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1W JEW FOOTSTEPS JN 
IN WELL-TRODDEN 
WAYS. By Katherine E. 
Conway. 




BOSTON: THE PILOT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
M DCCC XCIX. 



tlftrary »f Cojjg?as^| 
Offfaa of tJjg 

By Katherine E. Conway. 



All rights reserved. 



Books by Katherine E. Conway. 



New Footsteps in Weil-Trodden Ways. 

Sketches of Travel. $1.25. 

A Dream of Lilies. 

Poems. Third edition. $1.00. 

Watchwords from John Boyle O'Reilly. 

Edited and with estimate. Fifth edition. 
75 cents. 

Family Sitting-Room Series. 

A Lady and Her Letters. 

Fourth edition. 50 cents. 

Making Friends and Keeping Them. 

Fourth edition. 50 cents. 

Questions of Honor in the Christian Life. 

Third edition. 50 cents. 

Bettering Ourselves. 

50 cents. 



:5.iT3Q 



Printed by 

Washington Press, 

18 Essex Street. Boston. 






SECOND COPY. 



Co 

/ll>£ Brotber at 1bome 

Bno 

flby Sister in a foreign Xanfc, 



CONTENTS. 



I. She Wouldn't, But She Did ... 1 

II. At Peter's Chair ..... 4 

III. Under Peter's Dome 11 

IV. The Unspent Force of Michael Angelo 24 
V. Our Lady or Italy 33 

VI. Citizen-Saints and Glorious Tombs . . 48 

VII. Two Noble Roman Ladies .... 64 
VIII. The Shadow of the Cross in Italian 

Sunshine ...... 77 

IX. Benedetto and Others 87 

X. Jerusalem in Rome 96 

XI. New Rome and St. Joachim's . . . 104 
XII. Catholic Remains and Ritualist Churches 

in London 117 

XIII. A Glimpse of the Second Spring . . 128 

XIV. Oxford and the Leading of the Kindly 

Light ....... 140 

XV. The Rector of Campion House . . . 149 

XVI. English "Continuity" in Rome . . 160 
XVII. Rome's English Memorials of Thirteen 

Centuries ....... 170 

XVIII. Ireland and America in Rome . . 192 

XIX. Glimpses of the Alps 197 

XX. Wood-Carving and Dolls' Houses . . 202 

XXI. Notre Dame de Namur 207 

XXII. A Bit of Irish Ivy 216 

XXIII. A Literary Fairy Godfather and Other 

People of the Pen 222 

XXIV. Religious Well-Springs in Ireland . 236 

XXV. Contrasted Voyages 247 



new footsteps in Well-trodden lUays. 



i. 

She Wouldn't, But She Did. 

There were three people on the good ship, 
New England — the Lest boat on the sea — who by all 
right and title should have crossed the Atlantic 
many a time — but who were going over for the 
first time in the early days of September, 1898. 

They confessed to one another their common dis- 
credit ; and interchanged pledges not to reveal it to 
the man from South Africa who had crossed nine 
times between Port Elizabeth and Liverpool, and 
made a tour through the United States and Canada 
besides. One of them made a firm resolution not to 
give a lecture on the trip ; and another pledged her- 
self not to make a new book thereon. 

But "tell us how this or that impressed you" 
was urged so often on the latter that she yielded in 
wonted fashion to the solicitation of circumstance ; 
and now breaks her good resolution by reprinting 
these notes of a trip in which sight-seeing was lim- 
ited by diminished strength and heart for it, and a 
secret sympathy with the pilgrims who were fain, for 
the time being, to fill the fountain of Trevi from the 
river of Lethe. 

She promises, however, not to attempt a consecu- 
1 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

tive relation of experiences new to her, but familiar, 
in their backgrounding, at least, to most of her 
readers ; but to take, here and there, a leaf from her 
memory's tablets, in which some fortunate incident 
may be of interest to others as recalling some pleas- 
ant reminiscence of their own. 

" Whatever else you do, go to Rome and see the 
Holy Father," said a friend, who glories above all 
else in being a child of the Church. 

To Rome I went, hastened on my way by an 
early chill in the air of London ; nor tempted for 
any but the briefest resting in Paris — which, beauti- 
ful and fascinating as it is — is too like the hard, 
shrewd World of a forsworn Trio, when one is not 
in the mood or with the opportunity to get behind 
its gold and crystalline glitter. 

To Rome, with brief rests at Chambery and 
Genoa, storing in my mind many pictures, of the 
Savoy Alps and the quaint towns and villages in 
valleys or on mountain slopes ; of Italy's vineyards, 
olive orchards, and orange groves ; glimpses of the 
Mediterranean blue under the bluest of skies, and 
the goldenest of sunshine; black, with flat, low- 
sliding white-edged waves, under the moonlight — 

The tideless, dolorous, midland sea 

of Swinburne's poem in which France is "the land 
of sand and ruin and gold," and things have gone 
to the bad generally. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

But Rome, at last, with its very modern electric- 
lighted station, and the new city as incongruous 
against the old as an Eiffel Tower beside an Alpine 
peak. 

A brief tarrying in a hostelry which to all 
intents and purposes might have been plucked up 
by the foundations out of New York or Boston, 
and dumped in Rome ; and presently I found 
myself in the heart of old Rome, beside the 
Minerva, with the Pantheon in sight, the American 
College within easy reach, and a guide, philosopher 
and friend at hand to bring me by short cuts to 
the realities of certain long-cherished dreams. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



II. 

At Peter's Chair. 

" But the Holy Father?" says the namesake of 
St. Teresa, with a suspicion of impatience in her bird- 
like accents. 

" Don't set your heart on seeing his Holiness," 
said a good friend in high place and power, on my 
first day in Rome, " for now, with his advanced age 
and infirm health the possibilities of an audience are 
not what they used to be." 

Fortunately, however, the Holy Father was 
stronger during the month of October than for 
some months previous ; and the opportunity hardly 
hoped for came. 

On October 14, the Pope received a little band of 
devout English and English-speaking Catholics, in 
which the Bostonian had the privilege of being in- 
cluded. The audience was given in one of the small 
halls of the Vatican. 

Just before starting she appeared before her men- 
tor in the Spanish church-going costume, which is the 
toilette of rule for a Papal audience, and enquired 
whether her objects of piety for the Pope's blessing 
were too much in evidence. 

" Nonsense ! There will be portmanteaux." 

That meant as to quantity, however. Think you 
4 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

that these earnest children of Holy Church, albeit 
from a land of paler sunshine and less demonstrative 
manner, would be outdone at the Chair of Peter by 
any fervent Frenchman or enthusiastic Italian? 

The ladies wore girdles for the sole purpose of 
attaching their scores of rosaries thereto, and the 
gentlemen had no reluctance in carrying full as 
many on their arms. All had brought as many cruci- 
fixes and other objects of piety as their hands could 
hold ; so that the solitary Bostonian was conspicuous 
chiefly for not bringing the possible devout storage 
of a steamer trunk. 

The audience was fixed for eleven o'clock ; and for 
nearly an hour before, the favored ones were in place, 
all eyes turned expectantly to the door through which 
His Holiness would presently be borne in. 

At last there was a slight movement, and, his mod- 
est retinue seeming to fall away as we looked, as the 
frame shades off from the picture, I saw in his chair 
of state, Leo XIII., the Visible Ruler of the Church 
of God, the latest in the long unbroken line through 
whose hands still thrills the touch of Christ as He 
placed the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven in the 
hands of Peter. 

I stood directly facing the door above mentioned, 
and had for a moment an unobstructed view of the 
Holy Father. Let me say, at once, that most of his 
pictures give a very imperfect idea of him. Think 
first, to get an adequate idea of his appearance, of a 

5 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

human body, blanched and etherealized by the exter- 
nal friction of the years and the inward burning of 
the thought, yet conveying no impression of sickness 
nor senility ; a large, grand head, that has never bent 
under the weight of the Triple Crown, the beautiful 
white hair of a patriarch to soften the strong, clear- 
cut features ; large, young brown eyes, alert and full 
of fire ; a brow the throne of a high directive intelli- 
gence ; and the chin of an indomitable will, modified 
by the singularly gentle and indulgent smile into 
which the firm ascetic mouth relaxes so easily. 

The chair-bearers halted towards the head of the 
apartment, so that the Holy Father commanded a full 
view of the people who stood in line about the apart- 
ment, leaving all the centre free. His little court 
grouped about him. Archbishop Stonor stood on the 
right, and Father Whitmee, the rector of S. Sil- 
vestro, behind him to announce the names as each 
one was presented. 

But first the Holy Father made a brief address, 
in which he referred to his first and only visit to 
London more than fifty years ago, and the flame of 
desire then enkindled in his heart, and burning only 
the stronger with the flight of time, for the conver- 
sion of the English people. His Holiness spoke in 
Italian, with much energy, constantly gesticulating 
with his long, lean hands. You would wonder at 
the strength of his voice, seeing the attenuated, spirit- 
like body. Archbishop Stonor translated the Holy 

6 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Father's words into English, and Father Bannon led 
the " bravas " at every pause. 

Then His Holiness graciously received every in- 
dividual with a kind word or a fatherly touch of the 
hand in benediction. When the Bostonian came 
and was presented in character, he took the hand 
from which the pen had slipped so wearily a few 
weeks before, in a strong, warm grasp, more like 
that of a man in vigorous middle age than of one 
verging on ninety. Then I had the blessing of his 
own venerable hand sanctified for its office, and by 
daily touch of the " Bread which giveth life to the 
world," which has traced words of peace to the na- 
tions, of freedom to the oppressed, of Christ-like com- 
fort and encouragement to the laborer heavy laden. 
It was a memory for a lifetime to be so near, even 
for a moment, to the High Priest who has, besides 
the prerogatives of his office, so many claims to the 
gratitude of the world, and the affectionate venera- 
tion of every child of Holy Church. 

The thought of it all made me silent. Contrary 
was the effect on an enthusiastic Irish girl who 
came next, and who after her presentation and bless- 
ing, turned back to press a bunch of rosaries against 
the Holy Father's hands, and returned to her place 
expressing her willingness to die on the moment ! 

At the close of the audience, the Holy Father 
extended to all an invitation to visit the Vatican 
Gardens ; but the rain began to fall, and few of 

7 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

the ladies were prepared to brave it. We con- 
tented ourselves with looking into the gardens 
from the windows, and had the privilege of 
visiting the Vatican Library with a party of 
American friends resident in Rome, under the 
guidance of Mgr. Ugolino, the librarian. 

I would like to tell you of some of the wonderful 
things herein guarded. Certain MSS. of tremen- 
dous literary or historic value held me long at their 
glassed cases — and I saw the handwritings of 
Dante, Petrarch, Michael Angelo, and Raphael; of 
Martin Luther and of Henry VIII. of England, in 
sundry love letters to Anne Boleyn. 

Then the cases which were not glassed, containing 
the Archives of the Vatican. What a magnificent 
act of faith on the part of Pope Leo XIII. to 
throw open this library and these archives to the 
scholars of every race and religion ! 

" But," interrupts one more interested in the 
Papal audience than in the library, " what did the 
ladies wear?" 

Every one knows that there is a special costume 
for Papal audiences. The gown must be black, but 
it may be of any material, and white trimming on 
the bodice is admissible. One may also wear jew- 
elry, at one's discretion. 

A mantilla or veil is of obligation. One may not 
wear gloves. Gentlemen wear evening dress. 

Little children may wear white. 
8 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

At the pilgrimage of French working people, 
which was received by the Holy Father in St. 
Peter's, the week before the audience just described, 
and at which the Bostonian was present as an on- 
looker, several Normandy peasant women were ad- 
mitted in their ordinary costumes. 

On that occasion I saw the Holy Father borne up 
the aisle to the altar at which he received the ad- 
dresses of the deputation. As he bent forward with 
his hand raised in blessing, visibly delighted at the 
great and enthusiastic assemblage, he seemed in 
the firm statuesque whiteness of his aspect, as if 
he were made of the alabaster of Maderna's mar- 
vellous St. Cecilia. 

There were other interesting audiences, of which 
I heard details from the favored recipients during 
the four weeks of my stay. 

One was accorded to an Australian priest who, 
accompanied by his niece, was conducted to the 
Pope's presence by the rector of the Irish college. 
His Bishop had requested the dignity of Monsignor 
for the priest, in recognition of his services to relig- 
ion and education, and the Holy Father himself 
announced the granting of this mark of favor, in a 
very kindly fashion. 

" Would you like your uncle to have a new dig- 
nity ? " he asked gently, of the Dean's relative ; and 
then he bestowed it, with a not-to-be-forgotten gra- 
ciousness and appreciation of the hard-working and 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

self-denying missionary who had wrought so well 
for God and for souls, far from his native Erin. 

The Greek Patriarch was in Rome in October, 
and had a long private audience with His Holiness. 
Afterwards, when his suite was admitted, there came 
with them a young Canadian priest of a famous 
missionary order. The Pope's keen eyes singled 
him out, and he entered into a brief conversation on 
the Manitoba School Question, showing a full grasp 
of it, and alluding to the audience he had granted 
Premier Laurier in the same apartment a few 
months before. 

There is not the slightest sign of mental deca- 
dence about Pope Leo XIII. , and even his physical 
strength seems great for a man of his years. 
There is nothing ghastly about his whiteness ; the 
prompt decisiveness and energy of his manner, tem- 
peramental evidence, are unchanged, say those who 
have seen him often since the beginning of his Pon- 
tificate, nearly twenty-two years ago. In the course 
of nature, the flame of that great life should soon 
escape its lamp, but the transition hour is not yet. 
Would that it might be far off ! 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

III. 

Under Peter's Dome. 

Once again I looked at the great Angel sheathing 
his sword on the summit of the Castle of St. Ange- 
lo; and I thought of David's vision of that other 
Angel of the Lord, standing between Heaven and 
earth with a drawn sword turned against Jerusalem. 
Worse evils than the material pestilence of David's 
or of Gregory's day have fallen upon the Holy City 
of the New Covenant. How long till the sword is 
indeed safe in its scabbard, the bondage of the 
Church broken, and the great High Priest and the 
multitudes going up again in splendor to offer the 
Supreme Sacrifice in the grandest Temple of the 
Most High God ! 

I went slowly over the bridge of St. Angelo, look- 
ing towards the Dome of St. Peter's, and thinking 
of the hosts which Dante saw going and returning 
upon it, at the first Jubilee in 1300, almost six cen- 
turies ago. 

But Dante saw not the St Peter's upon which we 
gaze today, else he had not left to Byron to be its 
laureate. I stood before it on the line of the begin- 
ning of the colonnades. Like you, dear, possibly un- 
travelled readers, I had seen it in pictures, and read 
of it in books. That day, however, I stood, as you 
on a future day will stand, before the reality, and just 

11 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

as unprepared as you will be for its overwhelming 
grandeur. I looked at the colonnades, and beyond 
the glorious fountains and the flawless obelisk to the 
church, and I said in my soul, " This is not a work 
of man, but a work of Nature" — nor knew that 
Mendelssohn had said just this before me 

" Don't hurry me," I said to my friend who had 
been a thousand times in St. Peter's, but was renew- 
ing his first emotion again in mine. My heart beat 
loudly; my throat fluttered; I felt as if Eternity 
were taking hold of me, as I moved forward to the 
fountains. 

I will not tell you how much ground St. Peter's 
covers ; nor how many pillars Bernini allotted to the 
colonnades ; nor how high the fountains throw their 
silvery spray, rainbow-crowned when the sun shines 
on them ; nor how many steps lead up to the great 
bronze doors. That is all in the encyclopaedias and 
guide-books. 

I wish I could instead make you feel the spirit 
which has created it ; the lives of the men of genius 
— Alberti, Rosselini, Sangallo, Bramante, Raphael, 
Peruzzi, Michael Angelo, Bernini — which are build- 
ed into it ; the virtue of the Apostles and Doctors of 
the Church, whose dust it shelters ; the magnificence 
of the symbolism of the Faith whose best visible ex- 
pression it is ; and the adoring love of the myriads 
who have worshipped within its walls that Divine 



12 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Presence which abides equally in the humblest 
church in Christendom. 

Was St. Peter crucified on the site of this great 
Basilica? That is the old and well-founded tradi- 
tion, though there is another in favor of the site of 
St. Peter's in Montorio. At all events, a temple to 
the Living God has stood upon this site since the 
Oratory built here by Pope St. Anacletus, A. D. 90 ; 
and the remains of SS. Peter and Paul, and of 
many of the Apostles and their successors, and the 
Doctors of the Church rest beneath its roof. 

Colossal figures of Christ and the twelve Apostles 
confront your gaze, above the facade of the Basilica. 
You see the martyrdom of SS. Peter and Paul, on 
the central bronze door of Constantine's Basilica; 
you see the Navicella — the ship of the Church 
which no storm can wreck. So much for a brief 
glance at the spiritual. On either side of the vesti- 
bule, Constantino and Charlemagne, colossal eques- 
trian figures, commemorate two great sons of the 
Church, (the one built the first Basilica of St. 
Peter, the other was crowned in it) who put forth 
their power as Christian rulers for the defence and 
extension of the Faith. 

Among the statues in the vestibule, which would 
make a great church in itself, is a beautiful allegor- 
ical female figure, bearing the symbols of the 
Papacy. Some Protestants beholding it say that 



13 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Pope Joan was no myth ! Have they not seen her 
statue in St. Peter's ? 

But lift the leathern curtain and enter the church 
itself. 

Have you not heard people say they were disap- 
pointed in St. Peter's? That is not what they 
mean. They want to say that they were bewildered, 
as I have been, and as you will be when that vast 
interior opens to you, and the great pillars seem to 
rush together, obliterating the spaces between, and 
in your eyes is a confusion of altars and tombs and 
statues, and myriad-hued mosaics and golden vaults 
and arches, and endless length and breadth, light in 
the midst and shadow at the ends. 

The first brass line on the floor tells you the 
length of St. Paul's, London, — 520i feet, or nearly 
a hundred feet shorter than St. Peter's. I have 
seen it, and it strains the mind to realize that it 
could be easily enclosed in St. Peter's. This fact 
once grasped, it is no effort to believe that the Pan- 
theon can be swung under Peter's dome, as Michael 
Angelo promised. 

Those doves of the Pamphili-Doria are the size of 
eagles. The Barberini bees are as big as robins. 
If those cherubic infants upholding the holy water 
fonts rose up erect, you would see them eight feet 
high. The statues of the Apostles and founders of 
the religious orders are gigantic. They seem of 
normal size, — but how small the people look up 

14 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

about the Confession of St. Peter, around which 
nearly a hundred bronze lamps are burning all the 
day. It is a long walk up to the High Altar where 
the Pope alone has the right to celebrate Mass. 
Over it is Bernini's baldachino of bronze taken 
from the roof of the Pantheon. 

Look down into the glowing circle of the lamps, 
and see Canova's glorious statue of Pope Pius VI. 
kneeling at the foot of the stairs facing the Apos- 
tles' Tomb. Then, look up into the Dome, 

"the vast and wondrous Dome, 
To which Diana's marvel was a cell — 
Christ's mighty shrine above His martyr's tomb." 

Read the inscription blue, on a rich gold ground : 

" Tu Es Petrtjs, et super hanc petram (EDI- 

FICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM, ET TIRI DABO CLAVES 
REGNI CCELORUM." 

The Evangelists shine down on us. The adopted 
Roman citizen beside us tells us that the letters in 
the inscription are six feet long, and the pen in the 
hand of St. Luke is seven feet. What matters it ? 
We are fast getting away from time and space. 
Our hearts shall wonder and be enlarged. Now 
we go in behind the High Altar, and up to the Altar 
of the Chair in the apse. The bronze chair (enclos- 
ing St. Peter's episcopal Chair) rises high above the 
altar, upborne on golden clouds. Beneath it, are 
colossal bronze statues of the Greek doctors, SS. 

15 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Athanasius and John Chrysostom, and the Latin doc- 
tors, SS. Ambrose and Augustine, with their hands 
upraised, as if supporting the Chair. 

We look closer. What would happen if they 
withdrew their hands? The Chair would stand as 
strong as ever, for it is upheld by the power of God, 
typified by the golden clouds, and Peter himself di- 
rected by the light of the Holy Ghost, which streams 
(in figure) from above it from that oval of pale 
golden alabaster against which the Heavenly Dove 
opens its wings. 

What a sublime conception, sublimely expressed ! 
Now look down the whole length to the portals. 

But thou, of temples old or altars new, 
Standest alone — with nothing like to thee — 
Worthiest of God, the holy and the true, 
Since Zion's desolation, when that He 
Forsook His former city, what could be 
Of earthly structures in His honor piled, 
Of a sublimer aspect ? Majesty, 
Power, Glory, Strength and Beauty, all are aisled 
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled. 

Yet we have seen but little of St. Peter's. Let 
us note the beautiful fitness (with the memory of 
the Holy Relics of the Divine Redeemer's all-atoning 
Sacrifice enshrined here) of the magnificent statues 
in the niches which support the Cupola, of St. Lon- 
ginus, St. Helena, St. Veronica, and St. Andrew. 

The life of St. Peter does not abound equally 
with that of St. Paul in dramatic and picturesque 

16 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

incident, as yon will realize by-and-by, after you have 
seen the interior of St. Paul's out side-the- walls. 

The only oil painting in St. Peter's represents the 
Fall of Simon Magus ; it is by Francesco Vanni. 

The mosaics, from pictures of the great Masters, 
representing among other events, the giving of the 
keys to St. Peter, the healing of the cripple at the 
Beautiful Gate of the Temple, the deaths of An- 
anias and Sapphira, the raising of Tabitha from the 
dead, and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, are of enor- 
mous size. Events in the lives of other Apostles ; 
other martyrdoms, the most painfully impressive be- 
ing perhaps that of St. Erasmus; saints especially 
dear to the Roman heart as St. Jerome and the sol- 
dier-saint Sebastian, are also portrayed in these 
great fadeless mosaics. 

When you come, dear reader, will you forget all 
the other beautiful commemorations of the Blessed 
Virgin Mother in St. Peter's — before the Pieta, 
wherein the young Michael Angelo embodied for 
the comfort of the time-long succession of world- 
wide human sorrow — the sorrow of the most afflicted 
Mother? Do not stay too long before it this first 
time, but go on where you can look up at the 
" Triumph of the Cross *' on the ceiling and remem- 
ber that 

" God sees the end, while we only see the way." 

Presently we were standing within the space 
which had been enclosed for the holding of the Vati- 

17 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

can Council, and trying to people it again with its 
participants. 

We heard chanting, sweet and faint, as from a 
long distance. 

u Vespers are being sung in the Canons' Chapel," 
said the Roman citizen. " Wouldn't you like to go 
in?" 

After a long walk across the church we came to 
this large and splendid Capella del Coro. 

A goodly representation of dignitaries, in their 
scarlet and violet robes, were in the grand, carved 
stalls. The long bench in front of the altar, under 
which the ashes of St. John Chrysostom rest, was 
occupied by people, evidently of the humbler rank 
of life. Of such, too, were the men, women and 
children who sat on the steps of the stalls. Only 
one person of visible worldly consequence had come 
early enough to secure a seat. Good Catholics stood 
here and there in groups, following the Vespers. 
Curious tourists sauntered in, stayed a few minutes, 
and then resumed their wanderings over the vast 
interior of the church. 

They would have been put out of Westminster 
Abbey for walking about during a service, and with 
some cause. But in St. Peter's, who noted the 
clatter of their feet on the marble, or the folly of 
the speech of most ? Both were lost in the vastness 
of the place, as the buzzing of insects would have 
been. 

18 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

The Roman people, the whole world's people, make 
themselves marvellously at home in St. Peter's. It 
is indeed, " the genial mother-hearth " of Julia Ward 
Howe's poem. We saw a tiny dark-skinned boy of 
three or four years of age, clothed in a tight little 
scarlet gown, with his older sister at the Vespers. 
When he got tired in one position — as small boys, 
puppies and kittens must very soon — he rose up 
and danced quietly on the pavement. 

Then his sister, distracting her lovely eyes from the 
Immaculate Mother of Bianchi's beautiful thought 
above the altar, would pull him down beside her 
into a moment's quietness. Before the little fellow 
resumed his innocent gymnastics, we saw a sweet 
little maiden of seven or eight years, with long 
golden hair, unhid by hat or veil or handkerchief, 
advancing slowly in front of the stalls for a better 
view of something which interested her. She stood 
right under the eyes of a high Papal dignitary to 
satisfy her curiosity, but he was undisturbed by her, 
and she was utterly unconscious of him. 

Presently Vespers were over, and we followed the 
procession of ecclesiastics to another chapel for 
Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. 

Thence we crossed once more to the altar of St. 
Petronilla (St. Peter's daughter either according to 
the flesh or the spirit — authorities disagree) and 
gazed upon the beautiful picture of her martyrdom 
and triumph. The man who vainly loved the young 

19 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Virgin Martyr of Christ stands sorrowfully at her 
open grave. Above she appears in the heavens, and 
presently he will be comforted by the vision God 
lets her give him of her glory, and the hope she holds 
out to him of sharing it. 

This was the picture at which Hawthorne's Hilda 
lingered on that eventful day before she made up 
her mind to lay down the burden of her sorrowful 
secret in the confessional. 

Let us walk across to the left side wing, and see 
that formidable array of confessionals, for strangers 
of amiost every tribe and people and tongue, and 
find the Pro Lingua Anglica with Hilda. 

The westering sun is illumining the church with 
broad shafts of golden light ; and we realize with 
Hawthorne that the comparatively small plain glass 
windows, so high above us, mean a new perfection 
in the edifice. 

A young mother has thrown up the curtain of a 
confessional and sat back in one of the penitents' 
places. Her beautiful brown baby is sleeping on 
her knees. 

The Bostonian is caught with a surprised look 
in her eyes. 

" They often bring their babies in here for a good 
sleep," says the Roman citizen indifferently. Indeed, 
it would be a very sick or restless bambino whom the 
equable climate of St. Peter's would not soon lull into 
a few hours' forgetfulness of his little miseries. 

20 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

But are these people behaving with fit reverence 
in this holy place ? 

They would answer you, if they thought it worth 
while to trouble themselves about the narrow notions 
of pilgrims from un-Christian lands, speaking, how- 
ever blamelessly, the harsh tongue of misbelief, that 
they are children in their Father's House. Why 
should not yonder poor mother nurse her bambino 
under the eyes of the good God who gave it to her, 
and made it so much more beautiful than the babies 
of the English and Americans ? 

There is nothing exclusive about St. Peter's — no 
family chapels — no deference to wealth. Its habitual 
attendants are humble people. It is chiefly the babies 
of the poor that are baptized in that noble font made 
from the cover of the Mausoleum of the Emperor 
Adrian. 

After you have come many times and lingered long 
and lovingly within, you will begin to grasp the spir- 
itual and material immensity of the " World's Cathe- 
dral," as Hawthorne happily calls it, and appreciate 
Byron's thought when he had grown at home in it : 

— its grandeur, overwhelms thee not ; 
And why ? it is not lessened ; but thy mind, 
Expanded by the genius of the spot, 
Has grown colossal, and can only find 
A fit abode wherein appear enshrined 
Thy hopes of immortality ; and thou 
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, 
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now 
His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by His brow." 
21 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

St. Peter's, as you know, dear reader, is not the 
Cathedral Church of Rome. That is St. John Lat- 
eran's. St. Peter's is the Temple of Christendom — 
the World's Cathedral wherein the population of a 
goodly city can be gathered. It holds easily 60,000 
people. 

Poor and rich, tourists and residents of Rome, drift 
into and all over St. Peter's, all day and every day ; 
and yet, it is so beautifully, so exquisitely clean and 
bright. 

You are entreated in a respectful notice at the 
entrance, not to bring your dog into St. Peter s ; but 
we saw now and then, a well-fed, sleek and dignified 
cat stalking across the sunlit spaces under Peter's 
Dome. 

I have seen only one thing anywhere to remind me 
of the freedom of the people in St, Peter's ; and that 
is the freedom of the people about the Federal build- 
ings in Washington. 

But the shadows are deepening. A minute more 
and the Ave Maria will chime from St. Peter's belfry 
and hundreds of others, and the great bronze doors 
will close until another sunrise. 

In St. Peter's, you feel for it the security of the 
Alps. Shall the Pope indeed be singing Mass at its 
High Altar when the trumpets of the Last Judgment 
sound ? 

I give a farewell pat to the paws of Canova's 
splendid lions on the tomb of Clement XIII., and 

22 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

stop for a farewell prayer at the Chapel of the 
Blessed Sacrament — only to come back at every 
chance during my month in Rome, and go away 
sadly at the last, because I have seen St. Peter's so 
Inadequately after all. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

IV. 

The Unspent Force of Michael Angelo. 

Of the host of great men whose memories and 
monuments bring pilgrims to Rome and to Florence, 
there is surely one, who, though he passed from 
earth more than three centuries ago, is still felt in 
both cities as an unspent force and inspiration. 
Michael Angelo Buonarroti still lives intensely in 
the mighty works of chisel and brush with which he 
adorned the capital of Christendom and the city of 
his birth. 

You are astounded, overawed, by the vastness of 
his intellect, the variety of the manifestations of his 
genius. Architect, engineer, painter, sculptor, poet, 
whatever man of artistic temperament can be, he 
was, easily and always greatly. He is superhuman, 
almost, in the directness of his aim, the strength of 
his will, the concentration of his intelligence. 

Do you need to see his portrait, painted by his own 
just hand, in the Uffizi Gallery in his native Florence, 
to realize his scorn of everything less than the best ; 
the fire of creative passion which at once sustained 
him and wasted him? It burns in those sombre, 
deep-set eyes ; it explains the sharp lines on the brow 
and cheeks of his maturity ; the half-sad, half-dis- 
dainful mouth : his fierce virility and austere self- 
restraint. 

24 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Was there any passion or power of created being 
beyond his understanding and expression ? Then he 
had mastered all the learning, all the literature of 
his time ; though it is easy to see what, in the latter, 
was most congenial to his nature. He is a brother 
of Virgil and Dante. In his expression of the his- 
torical facts and Divine Mysteries of Holy Writ, 
one would be tempted to believe that the Almighty 
Creator, Law-Giver, Avenger, Christ the inflexible 
Judge, appealed more to him than the all-loving 
and forgiving Father, or the suffering Redeemer, till 
one remembers his Annunciation and his Pieta. 

What a beautiful Eve he gives us in his grand 
frescoes of the Creation on the vault of the Sistine 
Chapel! Yet why does he make the serpent look 
down from the tree about which it is entwined, on 
our ambitious and credulous First Mother, with the 
face and flowing hair of a lovely woman ? We find 
Eve's temptation treated in precisely the same 
manner in one of Raphael's pictures in the Vatican, 
and again in the stone sculptures in the porch of the 
Cathedral of Cologne. 

Had he a thought of the myth of Lilith, the witch- 
wife of Adam? 

"Not a drop of her blood was human, 
But she was made like a soft, sweet woman." 

According to the legend, she was jealous of her 
supplant er, and determined to destroy her happiness. 
She would not have gone about the affair just that 

25 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

way, I fancy. Anyhow, Michael Angelo was too 
faithful to Revelation to take thought of the old 
Talmudic story. 

Rather was it his intent, I imagine, to put forth 
unmistakably the Scripture teaching that the temp- 
tation of our First Parents was intellectual — " Ye 
shall be as gods, having the knowledge of good and 
evil." Satan's beautiful disguise was to help him in 
his quest of an honest partner for a swindle — not 
half so hard to find as the Oriental Samith would 
have us believe ! 

Turning from his majestic Patriarchs and Prophets 
and his mysterious Sybils, we shudder away from his 
" Last Judgment." Yet back to it we go, irresistibly 
drawn, terribly fascinated, lingering till we store its 
details in our memory. Dare I essay my poor de- 
scriptive powers on what master-pens have written of 
so well before me? What an intellectual "Last 
Judgment " it is ! It excites an intellectual, not a 
fleshly horror, wherein it is in strong contrast with 
Fra Angelico's " Last Judgment " in the Bell' Arti, 
in Florence. 

Michael Angelo makes no ostentation of impreg- 
nable prison-bars, and flames, and brute-headed 
demons with terrible eyes, and the lost gnawing their 
flesh till the blood runs in red rivers, as they realize 
that their woe is forever ; but somehow his picture 
leaves a more lasting and fearsome impression on the 
mind. 

26 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Is this inexorable and omnipotent Christ the same 
who lay in the white, pathetic stillness of death, on 
the knees of His broken-hearted Mother? Is this 
timid creature who veils her face before the awful 
Judge, the same who was erst so motherly-free with 
the prone head and helpless hands of her Son, the 
dead Saviour ? It is only by contrasting his Pieta 
and his Last Judgment that one can even faintly 
estimate the range of Michael Angelo's genius. 

The Pieta is as exquisitely beautiful as the loveliest 
of Greek sculptures, and as sorrowful and tender as the 
dream of some sweet woman-saint, herself a mother, 
of the sorrow of the sinless Mother of the Divine. 

The Last Judgment excludes all idea of beauty. It 
is horrifying but sublime. In the lower right-hand 
division the resurrection of the dead is depicted with 
marvellous movement and energy. You can see them 
crowding up against one another out of the earth, and 
actually watch the flesh covering the bones again. 

The lost drop like plummets to their doom. The 
saved ascend in far greater multitudes than Fra 
Angelico suggests in his picture ; but Michael Angelo 
does not lighten the gloom of his Last Judgment by 
any glimpse of the blessed in Heaven, as the saintly 
Dominican artist does. 

Certain characters of the Old Testament made 
especial appeal to the genius of Michael Angelo. 
Note his young David, which some have called his 
masterpiece, in the Beir Arti, in Florence. Not only 

27 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

is this David a youth of beautiful countenance, but 
an athlete as strong and graceful as any who ever 
won the laurels in the old Olympian games. 

Then his magnificent Moses, on the Mausoleum of 
Pope Julius II., at San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, 
which is most truly his masterpiece. Grander than 
the grandest Pagan conception of Olympian Jove, is 
the great Lawgiver and Leader of the Chosen People, 
seated in majesty. One hand rests on the Tables of 
the Law, the other grasps his flowing beard. His 
brow is bent. His eyes look forth sadly, as if he saw 
in prophetic vision, the coming rejection of the 
obstinate people whom he had so loved, and from 
whom and for whom he had so greatly suffered. It 
is the very embodiment of the majesty of the Divinely 
given Law. It is the only adequate representation of 
that Prophet like unto whom none rose again in 
Israel ; him whom the Lord knew face to face, and 
talked with as friend to friend ; the greatest man in 
the Scripture narrative save only the God Man. 

See how the genius of Michael Angelo sets off this 
sublime figure. In the niches on each side of it are 
two beautiful Hebrew women of an earlier age ; Leah 
who holds proudly up her deftly-swaddled baby, as if 
it were indeed the sceptre of the tribe of Judah ; and 
her fairer and more beloved sister Rachel, prayer- 
fully uplifting empty arms. 

The individuality of all Michael Angelo's feminine 



28 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

creations is remarkable. Raphael, even in his 
Madonnas, falls far below him in this. 

The Italian masters never wearied of portraying 
the Annunciation ; and in what a variety of attitude 
and occupation have they depicted the Virgin of 
Nazareth at the coming of Gabriel ! Some represent 
her kneeling in prayer. Era Angelico's Virgin is 
seated in devout meditation. Some make much of 
her domestic character, and put a work basket or a 
spinning wheel near her. Barrochi has a cat curled 
up asleep on a cushion in the foreground of his 
Annunciation ! 

But Michael Angelo's Virgin — oh, such a lovely 
contemplative, scholarly young Virgin ! is standing 
at a reading desk, on which are spread the Sacred 
Scriptures, and turns from the inspired page — was 
it of the Virgin of Isaiah's prophecy ? — to greet the 
Angelic Messenger. 

Michael Angelo's long day was the day also of 
Leonardo da Vinci, of Bramante and Raphael; of 
Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence ; Popes Julius 
II., and Leo X., Clement VII., and Paul III. in 
Rome — all five his patrons. 

His relations with Pope Leo X. were not alto- 
gether as satisfactory as with that Pontiff's immediate 
predecessor and successors. Michael Angelo would 
hardly accept suggestion, much less dictation, in the 
matter of his art, even from the supreme authority 
in the Church, or so refined a judgment in the arts 

29 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

as Leo X. undoubtedly possessed. This Pope found 
Raphael a much more congenial character. 

Michael Angelo' s relations with Pope Clement 
VII. began unauspiciously ; for, in the troubles 
between Rome and the Republic of Florence follow- 
ing on the sacking of Rome by the Constable de 
Bourbon in 1527, he made the fortifications which 
enabled his native city to hold out for nine months. 
When it fell, through treachery, its great defender 
fled ; but the Pope promptly pardoned him, recalled 
him to Rome, and loaded him with marks of appreci- 
ation. Indeed, he showed his sense of the value of 
the treasure which the world possessed in Michael 
Angelo, by sending him a brief, on the completion 
of his statues of " Night and Morning," commanding 
him under pain of excommunication, to take good 
care of his health. 

Another Pope, Julius III., receiving him one day, 
rose at his approach, seated him at his right hand, and 
disregarding the Cardinals and ambassadors present, 
conversed with him as with a close and equal friend. 

It was under Pope Paul III. that he was appointed 
chief architect of St. Peter's, and wrought marvels 
in this capacity that overshadow all his other works. 
Who but one of the mighty Intelligences, for which 
he was so well named, could have surpassed 

u The hand that rounded Peter's Dome 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome ? " 

Though the man, Michael Angelo, was reserved, 
30 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

almost to sternness, his true life aloof from men, in 
his own world full of the creations of his genius ; 
inaccessible to flattery — almost inaccessible to friend- 
ship — yet all men acknowledged his exalted motives, 
his stainless honor and integrity. 

One creature, at least, found his human heart, 
and for her he was a poet. Vittoria Colonna, 
Marchioness of Pescara, widow of the commander 
who conquered Francis I. at the battle of Pavia, was 
the inspiration of those wonderful sonnets which 
prove Michael Angelo great in poetry as in all else. 
She was a most beautiful, gifted and devout woman. 
They still show you her house in Rome, and a street 
is named for her. 

Wonderful, indeed, she must have been to please 

him who was overwhelmed with divine discontent in 

view of the best attainments of his own or others' 

genius ; and to win from him such tribute as this : — 

" The might of one fair face sublimes my love, 
For it hath weaned my heart from low desires ; 
Nor death I heed, nor purgatorial fires. 
Thy beauty, antepast of joys above, 
Instructs me in the bliss that saints approve ; 
For oh ! how good, how beautiful, must be 
The God that made so good a thing as thee. 
So fair an image of the Heavenly Dove. 
Forgive me if I cannot turn away 
From those sweet eyes that are my earthly heaven, 
For they are guiding stars, benignly given 
To tempt my footsteps to the upward way, 
And if I dwell too fondly in thy sight, 
I live and love in God's peculiar light." 
31 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

They never came to a closer union than this high 
and affectionate friendship. Hermann Schneider 
has made a picture of Vittoria Colonna sitting at the 
feet of the statue of Moses, while Michael Angelo 
stands at the other side of his masterpiece, conversing 
with her. Perhaps it is symbolical. His art, after 
all, came between himself and the fulness of human 
love. At any rate, he outlived the one woman who 
in some sort shared his mind and adequately wor- 
shipped his genius. She died in 1547 — and for 
seventeen years longer, he wrought on in the " sad 
sincerity " of his lonely heart, for the after delight of 
a world whose utmost praise was less to him than the 
breeze above the laurel trees. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



V. 
Our Lady of Italy. 

Longfellow makes Prince Henry in the Golden 
Legend, soliloquise as he and Elsie come into Italy, 

" This is, indeed, the Blessed Mary's land — 
Virgin and Mother of our dear Redeemer." 

Yet we must not claim too much even for lovely 
Italy. Spain is also " the land of the Most Holy 
Mary." In the vision of Catherine Laboure as you 
will remember, the rays from the outstretched hands 
of the Blessed Mother of God, fell most abundantly 
on her native France. Even in England of today, 
still so largely Protestant, it is easy to find from her 
ancient churches, and the customs and traditions 
which linger among her people, a reason for her 
olden title, " Our Lady's Dower." 

Nevertheless, they love the Blessed Virgin Mother 
in Italy with an exceeding great and most human 
love. They do not adore her. Make no mistake on 
that point, my possible non-Catholic reader ; no 
matter what Protestant tourists, ignorant of the 
Faith, the language, and the nature of the Italians, 
may tell you to the contrary. 

The humblest woman or child of them all under- 
stands Our Lady's place in the Church. Look at 

33 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

yonder young peasant mother, with the awful grief 
in her dark eyes ; listen to her, as she lifts imploring 
hands, and sways back and forth in the passion of 
her prayer, seeking the intercession of her dear 
Madonna for a sick child or a wayward husband in 
some favored shrine : 

" Help me ; you can do it, you understand my need, 
because you are a woman and a mother" 

The Italians have supreme devotion to the Eternal 
Father, the Divine Creator, who gives the bountiful 
harvests and the handsome and strong bambinos. 
In singular evidence of this devotion, you see the 
traditional artistic representation of God the Father, 
the Provider, as the emblem on the doorways of Life 
Insurance Companies. 

But the Eternal Father represents also the rigorous 
laws of Nature, even the innocent transgression of 
which brings sorrow. He is not only the Avenger 
of evil-doers, but the mysterious Providence which so 
severely tries the just. Sometimes for the punish- 
ment or the perfecting of His children He seems to 
turn His face from them, to veil His tender mercies — 

"Thou hast covered Thyself with a cloud, 
And our prayers may not come through." 

The creature writhes helpless under the pressure 
of Almighty Power ; he dashes himself in vain resent- 
ment against the barrier of an inexorable Law ; or 
lies down without hope or heart that the iron wheel 

34 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

of inevitable Consequence may go over him ; till, 
suddenly he bethinks himself of his sinless Sister, 
and, 

' ' — Not venturing to draw near 
With his requests an angry Father's ear 
Offers to her his prayer and his confession, 
And she for him in Heaven makes intercession." 

She can move again the heart of the Father for His 
erring child ; yea, even her prayer is potent to sus- 
pend the Law or break the wheel of Consequence. 

To the Italian, " the dear Redeemer " is always 
the Son of His Mother, alike on Calvary as in Beth- 
lehem ; and to their logical minds, he who praises 
the Son, be it ever so fervently, and disparages the 
Mother, is not a Christian. 

One must realize all this as the foundation of the 
Italian devotion to Our Lady, to appreciate its recti- 
tude, fervor and poetic beauty. 

In Rome alone nearly one hundred churches are 
dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, from the Basilica, 
Sta. Maria Maggiore, in the Esquiline — one of the 
four patriarchal basilicas — to the little circular 
chapel, Our Lady of the Sun, in the Velabrum, 
supposed to be an old-time Temple of Vesta. 

Sta. Maria Maggiore is a very ancient church, 
dating from the reign of Pope Liberius, a. d. 352. 
Our readers know the story of its origin — the vision 
of John the Patrician and his wife, the chosen site 
covered with snow in summer, in memory of which 

35 



NEAV FOOTSTEPS IN 

miracle the church keeps the feast of Sta. Maria ad 
Nives — Our Lady of the Snow — on August 5. 
Every year, when this Basilica celebrates its birth- 
day, rose-leaves are made to fall through the dome 
during the Mass, in token of that wondrous snowfall 
of the olden time. 

In this church is the Borghese Chapel, the largest 
and most magnificent family chapel in the world, 
whose decorations are an exposition of the Catholic 
teaching in regard to Our Lady : conceived Immacu- 
late, Mother of Christ, ever Virgin. One of the 
Madonnas, attributed to St. Luke, is above the altar. 
The four great prophets, leading with Isaiah, who 
foretold the Virgin Mother, are in the pendatives of 
the dome. Aaron and David, her priestly and her 
kingly ancestors ; St. J oseph, her spouse, and St. 
John the Evangelist, her adopted son, are commem- 
orated in statues ; St. Luke, who gives the sufficient 
foundation of all Catholic devotion to her in the first 
chapter of his Gospel, is the subject of a large fresco- 
The Doctors of the Church who wrote best of her, 
the spiritual and military conquerors in her name, 
the defenders of her Immaculate Conception, her 
poets, and the women-saints, who, like her, were 
wedded virgins, are all depicted in this chapel. 

Most prominent of all the frescoes is the Madonna 
of the Immaculate Conception, to which Longfellow's 
lines would apply, as well as to the picture for which 
they were written. 

36 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

" Bright angels are around thee ; 

Their hands with stars have crowned thee ; 

Thou peerless queen of air, 

As sandals to thy feet the silver moon dost wear." 

The forest of white pillars in the nave of the 
Basilica, the first American gold in its ceiling, speak 
eloquently in fact and symbolism in Our Lady's 
honor. Yet Sta. Maria Maggiore, in its vastness 
and whiteness, oppressed and dazzled me. Much 
more appealing and devotional I found Santa Maria 
in Trastevere — titular church of His Eminence 
Cardinal Gibbons — which for the mosaics in the 
sanctuary and some other points of family resem- 
blance, I called a little sister of St. John Lateran's. 

Another church of Our Lady, in which my Ameri- 
can soul delighted for the name's sake was Santa 
Maria del Popolo — Our Lady of the People — so 
called because it was built by the offerings of the 
common people. Our Lady under this title is the 
subject of a striking picture by Frederigo Baroccio, 
in the Ufnzi Gallery, Florence. 

The Virgin Mother, with her Divine Child, ap- 
j)ears in the heavens to a crowd of poor men and 
women, peasants and artisans, in the costumes and 
with the implements of their condition and trades. 

" When wilt Thou save the people, 
O God of Mercy, when ? 
Not crowns and thrones, but nations ; 
Not kings and lords, but men." 
37 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Far greater the need today to invoke Our Lady of 
the People, when the poor are oppressed as perhaps 
never before in Italy — nothing but water and air 
escaping taxation — for the maintenance of an Army 
and Navy in wild disproportion to the country's 
legitimate needs. 

The church is built on the site, it is believed, of 
the tomb of Nero, and in one of its chapels is the 
exquisite Nativity by Pinturicchio — where the Divine 
Babe is playful under the eyes of His young Mother. 

As Goethe says of another Holy Family : 

" What joy that sight might bear 
To him who sees them there, 
If, with a pure and guilt untroubled eye, 
He looked upon the twain, like Joseph standing by." 

Two other famous churches of Our Lady, best 
known, however, by their ancient Pagan names, are 
the Pantheon, St. Mary of the Martyrs, and the 
Minerva, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, which being 
interpreted, means St. Mary's Church on the Temple 
of Minerva. 

It seems to me that there is a fit symbolism here, 
in foundation and superstructure, inasmuch as Min- 
erva, the Virgin Goddess of Wisdom, was a Pagan 
prototype of the created Virgin Mother of the 
Christian Dispensation whom we invoke as " The 
Seat of Wisdom." 

The Minerva was the spiritual home of the Bos- 
38 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

tonian in Rome, and there was opportunity to note 
many characteristic manifestations of the love of these 
simple people for their dearest Patroness. 

The chapel of Our Lady of Consolation was a 
favorite shrine ; and I often saw suppliants give a 
farewell kiss to the picture of the Blessed Mother 
outside the railing, as they concluded their prayer, 
just as if they were taking leave of some dear one in 
the home. A little child would run in from the 
street, reach up and kiss the Blessed Mother, and 
run out to its play again. 

The Rosary devotions were celebrated with special 
fervor — it is a Dominican Church — and drew 
crowds. A feature of the parish festival, the Ma- 
ternity of the Blessed Virgin, which took place during 
my visit, was a serenade to Our Lady at one of her 
street shrines outside the hospital. 

The street-shrines in honor of the Blessed Mother 
of God, in Rome and its neighborhood, are almost 
countless. Scarcely a building for public or private 
use in Old Rome, but has its picture of the Madonna 
painted somewhere on the outer walls. Often you 
see the angle of a corner smoothed into a narrow 
flatness, and to this is attached a picture of Our Lady, 
glassed over to protect it from the weather, and with 
a lamp burning at night before it. 

Pictures of the Blessed Virgin are generally to be 
seen in conspicuous places in shops and restaurants ; 
in offices and inns. 

39 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

I noted a lovely one in the court-yard of the 
Quirinal. 

The representation is nearly always of the Virgin 
Mother with the Divine Child. The Italians seem to 
have no fondness for pictures of Our Lady alone. 
From the simple picture on the house-wall, to the 
glorious creations of the masters in the Vatican 
Gallery or the wonderful galleries of Florence, it is 
always " Vergine e Bambino." So are the Child 
and His Mother in the hearts of the people. 

Her statues surmount churches and convents raised 
under her invocation ; or are uplifted on pillars or 
towers. Perhaps the most notable of the statues is 
Bertelot's upon the Colonna della Vergine (column 
of the Virgin) in front of Sta. Maria Maggiore. 
This is the last remaining column of the Basilica of 
Constantine, and was erected in this place by Pope 
Paul V., in 1613. 

Every time I went my way from the Minerva to 
St. Peter's, I saw the noble mediaeval Torre della 
Sciniia, which every reader of Hawthorne calls 
u Hilda's Tower," and looks for at once in Rome; 
and the statue of Our Lady whose light the sweet 
Puritan maiden so faithfully tended, the while she 
grieved that her own cold creed offered no Heavenly 
Mother to whom a motherless girl could pray for 
sympathy and counsel. 

Going north from Rome, you find the street shrines 
still in Florence, but not in evidence in Milan. 
40 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

There is an association in my own mind of religious 
reserve and Gothic churches. 

I have named but a few of the churches of the 
Madonna, even in Rome. Readers who have visited 
the Eternal City may wonder why I have not spoken 
of the Ara Coeli, or these twin churches of Our Lady 
at the opening of the Corso — St. Mary of the Miracles, 
and St. Mary of the Holy Hill, and the interesting 
legends connected with their building. 

We were leaving Santa Maria del Popolo, which 
is very near these two, and the Roman citizen had 
just shown me the neighboring house of the Augus- 
tinians in which Martin Luther lodged on the occasion 
of that visit to Rome which preceded his apostacy. 

Strange that few should have rendered more elo- 
quent testimony to the Immaculate Conception of Our 
Lady than this poor heresiarch! and that the last 
descendant of his marriage with Katharine von Bora 
should, a few years ago, have become a Catholic ! 

Besides the churches specifically dedicated to the 
Virgin Mother, she has in all churches, of whatever 
title, her own chapel, and her favored shrines. 

" Come with me," said the Roman citizen, inter- 
rupting my reflections on Luther, " and I'll show you 
one of the most beautiful things in Rome." 

We wended our way to San Agostino — near Hilda's 
Tower again — and entering, saw beside the west en- 
trance, a most wonderful evidence of devotion to the 
Blessed Mother and testimony to its exceeding efficacy. 
41 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Raised on a platform set against the wall is the 
great bronze Madonna of Andrea Sansovino, called 
the Madonna del Parto. She is seated, throned and 
crowned, so to speak, holding her Divine Child, and 
circled with lights, from the tiny taper to the wax- 
light as thick as a child's arm. A gracious queenly 
face looks down upon her clients, and the Baby 
King of Kings puts His power in her hands. 

The recipients of her favors have covered her neck 
and bosom with necklaces of jewels, and chains of 
gold and silver. She is more than triple-crowned. 
Her arms are covered with bracelets and her fingers 
with rings to the very nails. The Divine Babe is 
literally swaddled with gold chains and rosaries richly 
jewelled, crowned, braceletted, and ringed till His 
little body can bear no more. The whole west wall 
is covered up to the ceiling, with votive hearts and 
crosses of gold and silver, silver arms and legs, silver 
ships, with pictures, crude enough, but most realistic, 
representing remarkable cures, or escapes from perils 
of sea or land. We saw bridal wreaths — thank 
offerings doubtless for the happy ending of certain 
tangled love affairs ; beautiful suits of baby clothes 
— even a white satin bow in a frame, the greatest 
sacrifice, perchance, that some poor girl could make 
in acknowledgment of some answered prayer. 

I lighted a wax candle as thick as my wrist, and 
set it in the outer radiance about the Madonna del 
Parto. 

42 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

" I don't like it !" said a dear little Catholic Puri- 
tan. Puritanism to-day, dear reader, is not a sect 
but a spirit, as Archbishop Corrigan once expressed 
it ; and there are many Catholic Puritans in the cold 
North, on both sides of the Atlantic. Do not bring 
any Puritanism to Rome; for you will lose many 
devout and poetic inspirations, and be uncomfortable 
besides, while your icicles are thawing ; for thaw 
they must, if you stay in " the City of the Soul " 
more than a week. 

For me, I love this tropical efflorescence of devo- 
tion and gratitude ; these proofs of the power of 
that Faith that can move mountains. Do not tell 
yonder Italian girl that it is better for her to resign 
herself and prepare to face the inevitable. 

" The inevitable doesn't always happen," she will 
answer triumphantly, and show you that silver ship 
or golden heart, and tell you a wondrous story of 
last minute help in proof. 

Somehow I think Heaven does not love best those 
pious women with fateful eyes, and ready acquies- 
cence in dismal portents, and illustrations from the 
trees that bear fruit after their kind, and the rivers 
that must run down to the sea ; but rather those 
child-hearted, and normal women, who flouting the 
French cynic, confidently entreat Heaven that two 
and two shall not make four, — and sometimes get 
their prayer ! 

Evidently, the Madonna del Parto has a tender 
43 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

heart for desperate eases and persistent feminine 
pleading. 

" But I don't like these people's expression of 
their devotion," says the little Puritan again, with a 
last look of strong disfavor at the almost barbaric 
splendor of Our Lady's environment. 

Yet she loves the Blessed Virgin as devotedly as 
any Italian of them all, and says her Rosary of tener, 
perhaps ; only her faith would take expression in a 
pure white statue, adorned with New England's 
delicate tinted flowers and with characteristic reserve 
in accessories, and moderation in lights. 

Nor will she like the Madonna del Gaboro, whose 
shrine at Albano, in the Church of Santa Maria 
del Rotundo, I visited with other friends some 
weeks later, just before leaving Rome. Here are 
some startling votive offerings — six wooden cases 
full of murderous daggers and pistols, hung up on 
the walls of the little sanctuary. The road between 
Albano and Rome was at one time infested with 
brigands. In some remarkable renewal of religious 
fervor in the church above-named, many brigands 
were converted, and the better to guard themselves 
against returning to their old, bad ways, gave the 
instruments of their wrong-doing to the Madonna, 
as a substantial pledge of their reformation. Here 
is a touch of chivalry which is rather appealing. 
Similar tokens from converted brigands are found, 
I believe, in a shrine of Our Lady at Subiaco. 
44 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

The silver hearts are the most frequent of votive 
offerings, and I never saw chapel or shrine of the 
Madonna in Italy without a goodly number of these 
testimonies of granted prayers. 

Naturally the shrines of the Madonna as the 
Mother of Sorrows or Our Lady of Consolation — 
after such famous ones as are referred to above — 
attract the most devotion ; for the old, old fashions 
of grief and death prevail in sunny Italy as else- 
where, and the Most Afflicted Mother never lacks 
the victims of sin or sorrow to pray before her, like 
poor Margaret in Goethe's world-story — 

" Incline, Maiden, 
Thou sorrow-laden, 
Thy sacred countenance upon my pain." 

Great sculptors and painters have adorned the 
churches and shrines of the Madonna with marvel- 
lous statues and paintings and frescoes in which every 
historical or legendary incident in her life is por- 
trayed. Will you quarrel with the humbler people, 
if they often turn from the works of Michael Angelo, 
Raphael, Perugino, Pinturruchio, Fra Angelico and 
the rest to say their prayers and lay their votive 
offerings at some shrine where the art is of the crud- 
est, and the taste the most questionable that you can 
think of ? Here is a little Bethlehem behind glass 
doors in the Minerva — Our Lady wears a red gown 
and a blue mantle. St. Joseph is clothed in a pur- 
ple garment and carries a silver watch at his belt. 
45 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

The Divine Babe, dressed in a linen slip, reposes on 
a bed of votive hearts. 

It is not beautiful to artistic eyes ; but it raises 
many a humble heart heavenward quite as effec- 
tively as Corregio's Nativity with its light-giving 
Babe, and its light-reflecting Mother. 

But the simple Italian folk love Our Lady in rai- 
ment which they can take hold of. It seems to 
bring her nearer to them ; and they want her close 
at hand in life and death. 

" Mother, is this the darkness of the end, 
The Shadow of Death ? And is that outer sea 
Infinite, imminent Eternity ? 
And does the death pang by man's seed sustained 
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend 
Its silent prayer upon Thy Son, while He 
Blesses the dead with His hand silently 
To His long day which hours no more offend ? " 

So at the sight of Leonardo da Vinci's " Our 
Lady of the Kocks," was poor Dante Gabriel Rosetti 
moved in his own heart, and for other hearts. May 
she of whom he sang so oft and well have shone up- 
on the difficult pass when his sad soul went 

— " blindly shuddering through " ! 

But the humblest wayside statue, the crudest wall 
picture, the most inartistic Bethlehem or Calvary in 
some poor chapel, flashes into the warm Italian 
heart a vision of the Lady of fair love and of holy 
hope, more beautiful and more comforting than 

46 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

brush can paint ; for he sees her holding in her own 
the hand of her Almighty Son, while she opens to 
her earthly children the heart of a woman and a 
mother. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



vn. 

Citizen-Saints and Glorious Tombs. 

Going from place to place in Rome, you see the 
huge oval of the Coliseum as often as you see the 
vast dome of St. Peter's ; and entering, it is not 
hard to picture the immense enclosure as it must 
have looked on any of the frequent occasions when 
Christians were martyred to make a Roman holiday. 
The Coliseum was begun a. d. 72, under the Em- 
peror Vespasian, and finished by Titus, after his 
return from the final conquest of Jerusalem ; its 
architect, saith tradition, being a Christian, Gauden- 
tius, who afterwards suffered martyrdom within it. 

The first authenticated martyrdom in the Coliseum, 
however, was that of the aged St. Ignatius, Bishop 
of Antioch, who many years before was the child 
" set in the midst " by Christ, at one of His most 
memorable exhortations to His disciples ; and, later, 
the disciple of St. John the Evangelist. 

Sienkiewicz has made the highly civilized, luxuri- 
ous and profligate Rome of Nero to live again for 
the modern reader ; and Rome changed little from 
Nero's day until that day, nearly three centuries later, 
when the purifying Cross came out of the Catacombs 
to be set on high and draw up the hearts of men. 

48 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

The scene in Nero's amphitheatre, so graphically 
described in " Quo Vadis " when the rank and wealth 
and beauty, of Rome, as well as its rabble, assembled 
to see Lygia and Ursus die, was duplicated in the 
Coliseum for St. Ignatius, and for the host of brave 
Christian men and women of every age, and condi- 
tion, who, after him, went to Heaven by way of the 
lions, or by those other crueller ways which the 
ingenuity of malice devised. 

The great ones of that day, secure in their own 
place and power, and with due measures taken to 
send their names down to posterity, looked calmly 
on the death-struggles of these obscure people — 
followers as they would describe them of a young 
Jewish Rabbi who preached an impossible doctrine 
and closed a short life with an ignominious death, in 
an insignificant conquered province — and accounted 
their lives foolishness, and their deaths without 
honor. 

Today, however, it is the prisoners of the Mam- 
ertine, the martyrs of the Coliseum, the victims of 
every outbreak of Pagan fanaticism in every prov- 
ince of the old Roman Empire, whose memories are 
enshrined in religion, in art, in literature ; whose 
glorious sepulchres are the term of never-ending 
pilgrimages ; while their persecutors are forgotten, 
or owe their place in the world's memory to the 
broad mind of that Church against which they 
wage;! unavailing war. 

49 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

The portrait busts of the Roman Emperors are in 
the Capitol — some in the Vatican as well ; the 
wicked faces of Nero and Caligula as prominent as 
the benignant ones of Augustus, of Vespasian, or 
the oft-sculptured Trajan ; but outside, Christ, with 
His two greatest Apostles and the two SS. John, 
His kinsmen, rise high over the Lateran, as if to 
guard and bless the Seven-Hilled City ; Our Lady 
of the Immaculate Conception looks down on the 
Barcaccia, or stone-boat of Domitian; St. Peter 
surmounts the Column of Trajan ; St. Paul that of 
Marcus Aurelius. The stones of the Coliseum 
would long since have been scattered in the top of 
every street but for the care of Peter's successors. 

Rome is very truly the City of All Saints; yet 
the Romans have a natural predilection for their 
citizen-saints, native or adopted. 

St. Peter, of course, comes next in the Roman 
heart to the dear Madonna, and wherever you find 
him, beginning with his World-Cathedral, you find 
St. Paul also — together, types of the universality of 
the Church's mission, and in the sense of their per- 
sonal relations, of united hearts and opposite char- 
acters. The altar tombs of two great Greek doctors 
of the Church, SS. Gregory Nazianzen and John 
Chrysostom, of St. Leo the Great, subduer of Attila ; 
of SS. Leo II., III. and IV., are in St. Peter's with 
the tomb of that Roman citizen and Pontiff, St. 
Gregory the Great, who left to his successors his own 

50 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

favorite title of " Servant of the Servants of God," 
who sent St. Augustine to England, and gave to the 
Church her majestic chant, which she calls by his 
name to this day ; of the Countess Matilda, of Tus- 
cany, who deserved this honor as the defender of the 
Papacy in the days of Pope Gregory VII. (Hilde- 
brand), and reconciler of Henry II. with that Pope. 

St. Peter has his other churches, including the 
little " Quo Vaclis " Church on the Appian Way ; 
and his share, of course, in all the churches of St. 
Paul. 

By the way, it seems not a little strange to find 
him with his Roman attributes even in the Protestant 
Cathedral of St. Paul in London. 

" You must see St. Paul' s-outside-the- Walls," said 
the Roman citizen. "All the Americans go there." 

My readers know that there is a large body of 
American Catholics — perhaps themselves are of that 
body — who regard St. Paul as an American himself, 
born out of time, so to speak, and with a great 
interest in printing-presses, rapid transit, and electric 
lighting. His eager spirit, his marvellous adapta- 
bility, his unresting pen, and constant Apostolic 
journeyings, must be the foundation of this faith. 

To St. Paul's we drove on a bright October after- 
noon, accompanied now and then for a piece of the 
way, by little, large-eyed boys, who smiled most 
beautifully and turned the most amazing somersaults 
on the receipt of a few centimes. 

51 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

We passed the vineyard of the noble Roman lady, 
the sweet Saint Frances, wherein disguised, she used 
to gather fagots and distribute them after among 
the poor; and the little chapel which marks the 
parting-place of SS. Peter and Paul, as each was 
taken his separate way to martyrdom. 

Presently the pure white marble pillared portico 
of St. Paul's — which, curiously enough, is being 
completed by the Government — rises before us. 
When this is finished, St. Paul's will be one of the 
not numerous Roman churches whose exterior pre- 
pares you for the beauties within. 

It chanced this afternoon that the Bostonian was 
the only American visitor at St. Paul's, the others 
being the lingerers from the great French pilgrim- 
age, the leaders of the little English pilgrimage, and 
a Greek Archbishop with his attendants. 

Very suggestive it was to see the English and the 
French ecclesiastics, in the sombre clerical attire of 
the West, pressing forward for the blessing of the 
swarthy, bearded Oriental, in his much more con- 
spicuous churchly raiment. 

St. Paul's-outside-the-Walls dates from the days 
of Constantine. Time was when it surpassed in 
size and splendor the ancient Basilica of St. Peter. 
Destroyed by fire in 1823, it was rebuilt under Pope 
Leo XI L, on the original plan, and consecrated, in 
1854, by Pope Pius IX. 

Many of the ancient treasures of the Church, 
52 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

saved from the flames, are in evidence, contrasting 
strangely with the brilliant modern paintings in the 
nave, illustrating the eventful life of St. Paul. Be- 
neath these are medallions of the whole succession 
of Popes from St. Peter to Leo XIII. , with spaces 
for just a few more. 

We see the ring of lighted lamps about the Con- 
fession of St. Paul, in front of the high altar, under 
which a part of his body rests, and his colossal 
statue with his inseparable companion, St. Peter. 

The Czar of Russia and the Viceroy of Egypt 
have given the malachite pedestals and the trans- 
lucent gold and white alabaster columns that sup- 
port the canopy over the high altar. 

In the Order of the Garter, occurring among its 
decorations is a memorial of the day when the sove- 
reigns of England were the protectors of this Basi- 
lica. The statues of Henry IV., in the vestibule of 
St. John Lateran, and of Charles V., in the vesti- 
bule of Sta. Maria Maggiore, testify to similar 
dignities of the French and Spanish sovereigns, in 
connection with each of these Basilicas. 

The statues of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, 
and of Pope St. Gregory the Great, proclaim the 
Benedictine association with St. Paul's, which dates 
back many centuries. 

We admire the strength and majesty of the eighty 
granite columns, which mark the division of the 
nave and aisles. We are fain to linger before the 

53 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

fragments of mosaics dating from the days of Hono- 
rius and Arcadius ; but we are already satiated with 
marbles and alabaster, gold and silver and jewels, 
paintings and mosaics, lavished for the beauty of 
God's house and the place where His glory dwelleth. 

Today, we are fortunate enough to find the great 
Chapel of the Relics open and brilliantly lighted, 
for the sake of the Oriental dignitaries and the pil- 
grims. This Basilica possesses the remains of St. 
Timothy, the dear disciple of St. Paul, for whom he 
drew the portrait of the Christian Bishop. It has 
also a large piece of the True Cross, encased in a 
cross-shaped frame of solid gold, the veritable chains 
of St. Paul, and many other interesting relics of the 
Apostles and first disciples of Our Lord. All these 
we were permitted to look at as long and as closely 
as we desired. 

A comparatively modern object of devout interest 
is the Crucifix in the chapel of the Crucifixion, 
before which St. Brigid of Sweden, the holy widow 
and religious foundress often prayed, during the 
years of her life in Rome, and from which Christ 
Himself is believed to have spoken to her, as she 
meditated on the sufferings by which He redeemed 
the world. It is an awe-inspiring Crucifix, and who 
shall say what Voices they may not hear who have 
risen even in this life to that spiritual height whereon 
the clamor of earthly desires has ceased to sound ! 
A majestic statue of St. Brigid by Maderna stands 

54 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

in a niche in this chapel. Here, too, is the Madonna 
(in mosaic) before which on April 22, 1541, St. Igna- 
tius Loyola and his first companions took their vows. 

Two other favorite saints always young, and 
always associated in the artistic and the popular 
mind in Rome and throughout Italy, are St. Stephen, 
the first martyr, and St. Laurence, the deacon. 

St. Stephen appropriately has a beautiful chapel 
in the Church of St. Paul, once his persecutor ; and 
a church, S. Stefano Rotondo, with realistic pic- 
tures of martyrdoms, far surpassing in horror even 
those in the triforium of the church of the English 
College. St. Laurence (S. Lorenzo) has besides 
the Basilica of S. Lorenzo-outside-the- Walls, five 
other churches in various parts of Rome erected 
under his patronage. To him also is dedicated the 
Cathedral of Genoa. 

In the first-named of these Roman churches, near 
the Campo Santo of the same title, and dating from 
the days of Constantine, are the " Confession " con- 
taining his relics, surrounded by the usual ever- 
burning lamps, Fracassini's frescoes of scenes from 
the lives of SS. Stephen and Laurence, and the 
splendid Mausoleum of Pope Pius IX., formerly the 
atrium of the ancient church, with its frescoes of the 
definition of the Immaculate Conception of the 
Blessed Mother of God, and of the Vatican Council. 

S. Lorenzo in Lucina has for altar-piece Guido 
Reni's Crucifixion. 

55 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

There is not, in the wide world, I believe, any- 
thing which conveys to the beholder so adequate an 
idea of the infinite desolation of the dying Christ, as 
does this masterpiece. There are no accessory 
figures at the foot of the cross ; no attending angels 
above it. The white body, blood-depleted ; the 
beautiful drawn face, with the death film gathering 
over the up-looking eyes, absorb the sight and the 
thought. I came out of that church with no clear 
idea of anything else in it but this wonderful picture. 

Among its relics my companion told me, is the 
gridiron of St. Laurence's fiery martyrdom. You 
often see realistic pictures of this terrible scene, and 
in all pictures of this saint, the gridiron appears. 
St. Laurence and St. Stephen are frequently intro- 
duced in pictures of the Madonna, with St. John 
the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist ; not sel- 
dom with St. Sebastian, the Soldier, and St. Jerome, 
two saints of surpassing popularity in Rome. 

Some of my readers may be able to recall a time 
when a " pet nun " or charming Sunday School 
teacher endeavored to wean them from the high- 
strung fictions of Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., or dime novels 
of the Indian-fighting and pirate variety, with the 
ascetic delights of " Fabiola " and " Callista." They 
will remember, too, that after a perfunctory reading 
or a free-minded skipping of all those descriptive 
pages of solid print about the catacombs, etc., they 

56 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

came at last on the fascinating characters of Sebas- 
tian, the soldier, dear little Agnes, and Fabiola 
herself. 

After hearing of so much that was poor and lowly 
in the membership of the early Church, it was de- 
lightful to come on saints like these, who were " in 
society,'' and went to dinner-parties and other festiv- 
ities in the best of style. The grave author yields 
a little to the romance of the situation, and you saw 
that Sebastian was young and as handsome as a 
Greek god, with the laurels of his early victories 
upon him, the favorite of the Emperor Diocletian, 
and the beloved of the Roman women — of none so 
much, though so secretly — as of the noble and 
beautiful, though most proud and reserved Fabiola. 
It was evident that Fabiola thought always of Sebas- 
tian, while Sebastian thought only of the coming 
chance to proclaim his Faith and win the martyr's 
crown. Then that memorable scene after Sebastian 
has announced his Faith, suffered his first torments, 
and has been again apprehended, when Fabiola hum- 
bles herself to beg his life of the Emperor, and knows 
that she has spoken in vain ; and through all the 
refined cruelty of Diocletian's compliments to her- 
self, realizes that the sad secret of her hopeless love 
is plain to him, and that he is enjoying her abase- 
ment and her grief. 

You would not have taken away Sebastian's palm, 
and had him settle down with Fabiola to the com- 

57 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

monplace happy domesticity of Vinicius and Lygia ; 
but you did think he might have cared for Fabiola, 
and have let her know it, before he went to his 
doom, that she might have had some human comfort 
to carry into the long days of hospital building, in 
her after Christian life ; as in the case of those 
martyr-lovers, St. Adrian and St. Natalia. 

The hero was more human-hearted in Cardinal 
Newman's romance ; and the beautiful Greek hero- 
ine was a woman with a past, who eventually became 
a martyr-saint as such a one does, sometimes. But 
"Callista" on the romantic side, pleased you vastly 
better than Fabiola; for you wanted warmth and 
color, and found it hard 

— "to breathe in that cold air 
That pure severity of perfect light " ; 

though frankly admitting that had you been in 

Fabiola' s place, you would have done just the same 

thing. 

Well, St. Sebastian, martyr, is as dear to the 
Roman heart, — masculine and feminine alike — 
today, as while his martyr palm was new in his hand 
in Heaven, and the fame of his courage still fresh on 
earth. 

In picture galleries and churches, you constantly 
come on the picture of his first martyrdom — he 
truly suffered two — the beautiful athletic youth, 
bound to a stake, and transfixed with arrows — no 
evidence of agony in the face, but with eager eyes 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

uplifted to the heavens, whence an angel comes 
clown with a palm' branch. 

Was it for some parallel in their common youth 
and beauty, emphasizing a fierce contrast in other 
things, that the converted Romans set Saint Sebas- 
tian over against Apollo in their minds ? Apollo 
was beautiful but maleficent. His emblem was the 
arrow, and he afflicted mankind with pestilence. 

Long after he had been dethroned alike from 
men's fear and hope in Christianized Rome, St. 
Sebastian began to be invoked against pestilence, 
and, at least, in one memorable year, 680, the plague 
immediately ceased on the erection of an altar in his 
honor, at S. Pietro ad Vincola. We have seen 
the ancient mosaic of St. Sebastian, and the tablet 
u To St. Sebastian, dispeller of the pestilence," in 
this church. 

Pictures of St. Sebastian by Caracci and Guido 
are in the Capitol. St. Sebastian appears con- 
stantly in pictures of the Blessed Virgin and her 
Divine Child, by Titian and other celebrities, in the 
Vatican galleries. 

He has his Basilica on the Appian Way, with a 
grand almost colossal statue from Bernini's designs ; 
and chapels in many Roman churches besides. 

This Basilica was founded by the Emperor Con- 
stantine on the site of the house and garden of the 
pious Roman matron Lucina, who nursed Sebastian 
back from his first martyrdom (by the arrows) ; 

59 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

and after his second, when he had been beaten to 
death by clubs and thrown into the Cloaca Maxima 
(the great Roman Sewer) recovered his body, and 
buried it in her own grounds. 

Lucina, you will remember, figures also in " Fa- 
biola." She was the widow of a martyr, and the 
mother of the lovely boy, Pancratius, who, for his 
stalwart faith, was exposed to a panther in the 
Coliseum, and so won his crown. 

St. Pancratius has a noble church in Rome. He 
was greatly venerated in England in the old Catho- 
lic days ; and one of the ancient churches of London 
— St. Pancras — still bears his name ; and gives 
the name also to the neighboring railway station ! 

But let us come for a little while to the Basilica 
of St. Agnes-outside-the-Walls — she has a church 
within the city as well — and see how the Romans 
still cherish this brave, beautiful Roman girl — 
" the loveliest child in Christian story" who lived and 
suffered nearly sixteen hundred years ago. 

She has passed into the Christian life as the very 
symbol of meekness and purity, a little white lamb 
of God. You know the story of her precocious 
sanctity and choice of the virginal life ; of the vain 
wooing of the Prefect Sempronius ; of her miracu- 
lous escape from the fate worse than death with 
which in his unmanly revenge he threatened her ; 
finally of her martyrdom by the sword. 

The Basilica of St. Agnes, built over the Cata- 
60 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

comb of St. Agnes, dating also from the days of 
Constantine, has retained more of its ancient aspect 
than most of the old churches, though some changes 
were made in the decorations at the rebuilding of 
the monastery by Pope Pius IX., in thanksgiving 
for the miraculous escape of himself, and many 
dignitaries, and the students of the American Col- 
lege, when a staircase fell in, dragging them all 
down, on April 14, 1855. A large fresco in a 
chamber on the right of the courtyard records the 
event, and on each side are the names of the favored 
ones. 

You descend a long flight of steps lined with in- 
scriptions from the Catacombs and then come on 
the beautiful interior. Under the baldachino, over 
the High Altar of the Basilica, stands a lovely statue 
of St. Agnes, of Oriental alabaster and gilt bronze, 
about the size of the girl of thirteen that she was. 
Below is her tomb, with the usual circle of lamps 
about it. There is a Seventh Century mosaic in the 
sanctuary representing the apotheosis of St. Agnes. 
One of her chapels has a head of Christ attributed 
to Michael Angelo. St. Stephen and St. Laurence 
have a chapel whose mosaic altar and relief date 
back to 1490 ; and the foster-sister of St. Agnes, 
St. Emerentia, another youthful martyr, has also 
her chapel, and appears in a fresco above the altar, 
a beautiful girlish figure in a greensward, with a tall 
white lily beside her. 

61 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

In this Basilica, on the Feast of St. Agnes, Jan- 
uary 21, are blessed the lambs from the wool of 
which the Archbishops' palliums are made. Before 
the Italian occupation the Pope used to go to St. 
Agnes' for this beautiful ceremony. In these days, 
however, the lambs have a little private audience of 
their own, being brought from St. Agnes' to the 
Vatican for the special blessing. 

St. Agnes has been always a favorite saint of 
young girls, of painters and poets. She is impar- 
tially invoked for religious vocations and for holy 
matrimony, and one of the most picturesque poems 
in the language, Keats' " St. Agnes' Eve," turns on 
the popular superstition of old English days, that if 
a girl would go to bed supperless and with certain 
other observances on that night her future lover 
would appear to her. 

A poem more in keeping with the traditions of 
St. Agnes is Tennyson's beautiful one, beginning : 

" Deep on the convent roof the snows 
Are sparkling to the moon." 

St. Agnes, with her lamb, is seen almost from the 
beginnings of Christian art. The great painters 
introduce her into nearly all their pictures of the 
blessed in glory. She is frequently an attendant 
figure in pictures of the Madonna and Child. 

Whose picture of St. Agnes, I wonder, suggested 
an exquisite poem by Mary E. Mannix, beginning : 

62 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

" It is but a simple picture just above my table resting — 
Child-like face upturned in longing to the promise of the 

skies, 
With a something nigh to sadness the sweet lips and forehead 

cresting, 
And a look of Heaven dwelling in the beautiful dark eyes." 

The poem tells the story of the Saint's martyrdom 
and its message for to-day, ending with these lines : 

"Mine eyes are not so blinded that they cannot see the 
shining 
Of illimitable brightness in the pathway of the Cross ; 
And my heart is not so narrow that its faith is past divining 
In earth's short-lived compensations, Heaven's irreparable 
loss." 

St. Agnes is often pictured with St. Cecilia — 
another darling saint of the Romans — but while the 
former is always "a slip of a girl," as the Irish 
would express it, St. Cecilia is the very ideal of 
beautiful and fully developed womanhood. The life 
of no saint is better known than hers, nor more read- 
ily lends itself to art. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



VII. 
Two Noble Roman Ladies. 

We were standing in the sudatorium of St. 
Cecilia's baths. This, with another apartment of 
her palace, forms a portion of her church, which 
rises on the same site in the Trastevere. In all the 
essentials of its original purpose, steam-pipes, heat- 
ers, etc., this hot-air bath is unchanged from the 
days of her martyrdom. 

" They really had a very fair idea of a bath-room 
in those days," said the Bostonian, after a critical 
mental comparison of it with the " modern improve- 
ments " of the average American home. She re- 
membered, in a second, that Rome of today gets its 
water supply through the aqueducts of the Emperor 
Claudius; the magnificent ancient bath-tubs, espe- 
cially an enormous one of pink and white marble in 
the Vatican museum; and the fact that the bath 
reached a sort of glorification, unduplicated as yet 
by the moderns, in imperial Rome. The bath not 
of cleanliness but of luxury — an aggravation of the 
finest club-house of New York — washed out, indeed, 
the foundations of the Roman Empire. 

The Roman citizen interpreted the troubled mind 
of the Bostonian. 

"No matter. You Americans can't help your 
64 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

utilitarianism. Why, even we have to rest our 
minds after long contemplation of Heavenly things, 
by an abrupt descent to earthly trifles. See how 
our great masters often put some homely detail into 
a conspicuous place in a great composition. Don't 
you remember the cat and the dog in the foreground 
of RossehTs > Last Supper,' in the Sistine Chapel ?" 

So, 1 turned somewhat comforted, to the fresco, 
representing the astonishment of executioners and 
Christians alike, at finding the gentle but intrepid 
Roman lady alive in this very room after her three 
days' bleeding from the headsman's ineffective strokes. 

You know the story of Cecilia, a Christian and a 
vowed virgin, who, in her father's palace, in the 
third century, devoted herself to the service of the 
poor, and to the praise of God in sacred music. She 
invented the organ for God's exclusive service, and 
played and sang so sweetly that angels came down to 
listen. Her parents, Christians though they were, 
gave her in marriage to the young Pagan noble, 
Valerian ; but such were his natural honor and 
virtue, that she easily won him to respect her vow 
and embrace the Faith. Returning from baptism, 
he found her at prayer, and beheld her Angel 
guarding her. He knelt beside her, and the Angel 
crowned them both, with bridal flowers fram Para- 
dise, and at Valerian's prayer, obtained from God 
the conversion of his dearly loved brother Tiburtius. 

The high rank of these converts enabled them for 
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a time to practice their Faith freely, and do much 
for the poor and persecuted among their brethren. 
Finally, however, the religious test was applied to 
them. They refused the heathen rites, and Valerian 
and Tiburtius, and their jailor Maximus, whom they 
converted, were beheaded together. Cecilia buried 
their bodies in the cemetery of St. Calixtus — I have 
visited the very spot. 

Then her own time came. The prefect Almachius, 
coveting her patrimony, and the additional wealth 
bequeathed her by her husband, denounced her as a 
Christian. She was condemned to be smothered 
with hot air in her own bath-room. The door was 
sealed, and the steam filled it. Three days later, the 
door was opened to bring forth her remains. She 
was alive and unhurt. Then lest a tumult should 
arise at the public execution of one so young and 
beautiful, so noble and charitable, as the beloved 
Cecilia, the prefect sent a lictor to behead her 
privately. Giving the three strokes permitted by 
the law, he only wounded her deeply in the neck. 
She lived long enough to receive the visit of her 
spiritual father, Pope St. Urban, and bequeath her 
fortune to him for the poor, and her palace to be 
made into a church. This was done, and the church 
consecrated by Urban, soon after her death, a. d. 
280. The church was rebuilt by Pope Paschal L, 
in 821, and modernized in 1725. Many bits of 
Pagan architectural beauty have been utilized within, 

66 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

and without, it keeps its Twelfth Century campanile. 

The life-story of the saint is told in fresco and 
mosaic within the church. Cecilia, Valerian, Tibur- 
tius and Urban, are pictured together in the altar 
canopy and sanctuary, and with them still another 
sainted Pope, Paschal L, already mentioned, to whom 
was revealed in a vision the place in the Catacombs 
where the uncorrupted body of Cecilia rested with 
her martyred companions, and who had them removed 
to her church in the Trastevere. 

To Cardinal Sfondrato of the sixteenth century, 
whose titular church this was, we owe Maderna's 
miracle of sculpture, which now rests upon her tomb, 
and has been so often copied as to be widely known. 
Sfondrato had Cecilia's tomb opened, and she was 
found just as Pope Paschal had found her over six 
centuries before, even her rich vesture unspoiled by 
the grave. A new coffin of cypress wood and silver 
was prepared for this blessed body, but before it was 
hidden from men's eyes, Stefano Maderna made it an 
ever-living beauty in the marble. 

We look upon this lovely effigy, resting under the 
altar over her tomb, and realize that we see her just 
as she lay in the first stillness of death, sixteen cen- 
turies ago. The beautiful oval face is almost hidden. 
We get just a glimpse of the curve of the cheek and 
chin, the shell-like ear, and the soft waving hair. 
The wound in the throat is hidden by a circlet. She 
is modestly composed in sleep, the long, slim hands 
- ' 67 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

lightly crossed. What is there comparable with this 
in Rome, except the sculpture's own Pieta in St. 
John Laterals, or Michael Angelo's, in St. Peter's? 
Ninety-six silver lamps, ever burning, mark the circle 
before the High Altar, enclosing the descent to St. 
Cecilia's tomb. She lacks not votive offerings of 
enduring value from her loving clients ; but the vase 
of fresh flowers, just brought her as a thank offering 
on the day of our visit, was still more eloquent testi- 
mony to her tender interest in the cares of her fellow 
Romans of today. 

We visited her chapel in the Catacombs, where her 
remains rested for several centuries before the vision 
of St. Paschal, and our friends told us of the out- 
pouring of Roman enthusiasm here and in the Traste- 
vere on St. Cecilia's Day, November 21. 

I thought of Raphael's St. Cecilia in ecstasy, with 
her holy companions about her, and the instruments 
of her art at her feet ; and of all the other attempts 
to portray her beauty, under which the canvas has 
glowed. A family picture, a family name wherever 
civilization has reached, is the dear patron saint of 
the divine art, the beloved daughter, wedded maid 
and martyr of Holy Mother Church. 

Chaucer and Dryden and a host of lesser poets 
have sung the angelic romance of her young life, 
the heavenliness of her music, the steadfastness of 
her Faith. 

But she has a greater fame than this. Every day, 
68 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

at every one of the quarter of a million Masses 
offered up the world over, her name is mentioned 
among the glorious company of Apostles and mar- 
tyrs, into whose fellowship we hope one day to be 
admitted, " Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, 
Cecilia, Anastasia." Back to time immemorial this 
honor — forward to the day of doom. Fame? 
Was ever fame like this ? 

Near St. Cecilia's Church is the Palace of the 
Ponziani family — the house to which, in 1396, young 
Lorenzo Ponziani brought home his child bride, 
Francesca di Bassi, now honored in the Church as 
St. Frances of Rome. It has little enough of a pala- 
tial aspect to-day, but the chapel in St. Cecilia's, in 
which the Ponzianis were buried, is still as interest- 
ing and beautiful as in the days when St. Frances 
offered here her fervent and availing prayers. Here 
we saw the tomb-stone of little Evangelisto, St. Fran- 
ces' second son. 

Do you know the life of St. Frances, by Lady 
Georgiana Fullerton ? It is a long time published, 
nearly forty years, I think, and I believe it was the 
pioneer of a new order in the writing of the lives of 
the saints for folk of English speech. Father John 
Talbot Smith justly complains of the devout writers 
who have presented the saints of God to us as if 
they were freaks, not human beings. Here is a life 
so abounding in the extraordinary, not to say the 
miraculous, that it could have been made most dis- 

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couraging to the ordinary Christian reader. But 
Lady Fullerton has written of St. Frances in a way 
to draw all hearts to her. The mistress of a lordly 
house, keeping up, when needful, like the dear St. 
Elizabeth of Hungary, befitting state in her attire and 
environment ; the gentle and loving wife, the tender 
mother ; and yet the marvel of austerity, like St. 
Monica ; the miracle-working and vision-favored, like 
St. Catherine of Siena ; the intimate of the blessed 
spirits, like St. Cecilia herself. 

It is recorded of St. Frances that, for many years 
of her life, she lived in the constant visible presence 
of her Guardian Angel. After her little boy died — 
Evangelisto, the inscription on whose tomb-stone in 
St. Cecilia's we easily read after all these centuries — 
he came back to his mother, bringing her by God's 
decrees, another and mightier Guardian Angel, to be 
with her till that day, when she, too, would behold 
the face of the Father. 

The unbeliever smiles, scoffs, mayhap, at things 
like these. The weak or little educated Catholic 
shrugs his shoulders, and says, " Thank Heaven, it 
isn't an article of Faith." 

But every day, we all say with our lips at least, " I 
believe in the Communion of Saints." How might 
not that article of faith become a matter of sight for 
any one of us, if we but took the shutters off the east 
windows of our soul, and kept them clean and clear 
for the Divine in-shining ! 

70 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

As the so often Catholic-minded Tennyson says : 

" How pure at heart and sound in head, 
With what divine affections bold 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 
An hour's communion with the dead. 

In vain shalt thou, or any, call 
The spirits from their golden day, 
Except, like them, thou too canst say 

My spirit is at peace with all." 

I like that " sound in head." St. Frances was as 
eminently practical as St. Teresa ; and was wont to 
say that a woman in family life should always be 
ready to leave God in the devotions of her choice to 
find Him in the duties of her state. It is told of 
her, that once, while she was at the Office of the 
Blessed Virgin in her oratory, she was called away 
five times by her husband, during her attempt to 
recite the first verse of a single psalm. Returning 
the fifth time, to the interrupted prayer, she found 
the psalm written in letters of gold. 

Or, as Eleanor C. Donnelly tells it, in her grace- 
ful poem, "The Golden Psalm" : 

The fair young wife no second summons needed, 
Nor showed unwillingness in word or look : 

But with angelic patience took the skein 
Of tangled duties from her spouse's hand, 

And, smiling, wove them silken-smooth again, 
Upon the precious reels of self-command. 

The sweet task done, 
And on her bended knees once more begun 

The interrupted psalm (0 bliss untold !) 
Upon the sacred page beneath her eyes, 
Sparkling and glowing with the sweet surprise, 
" Beatus Vir " was writ in lines of gold ! 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

In sight of the majestic ruins of the Forum, and 
just beyond the Basilica of Constantine, is the 
Church of Sta. Francesca Romana, to speak her name 
and title for once in her own sweet Italian tongue. 

It is a very old church, originally built by Pope 
St. Sylvester on the site of a temple of Venus. You 
know that this goddess was exorcised from the 
popular heart, largely through the substitution in her 
shrines and groves and promontories of the most 
pure name and effigy of the Blessed Mother of God. 
So this church was long dedicated to the " Mother 
of fair love," first under the title of Santa Maria 
Antica, then of Santa Maria Nuova. St. Frances had 
been all her life a frequent worshipper in this holy 
place, and here, in 1440, her body was brought for 
burial. 

Writes Lady Fullerton of those marvellous obse- 
quies : 

" The popular feeling burst forth on the occasion ; 
it was no longer to be restrained. Francesca was 
invoked by the crowd, and her beloved name was 
heard in every street, in every piazza, in every 
corner of the Eternal City. It flew from mouth to 
mouth, it seemed to float in the air, to be borne 
aloft by the grateful enthusiasm of a whole people, 
who had seen her walk to that church by her mother's 
side in her holy childhood ; who had seen her kneel 
at that altar in the grave beauty of womanhood, in 
the hour of bereavement, and now in death, carried 

72 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

thither in state, she the gentle, the humble saint of 
Rome, the poor woman of the Trastevere, as she was 
sometimes called at her own desire." 

St. Frances was buried under the High Altar ; 
and so many and wonderful were the miracles attest- 
ing her sanctity, that she was canonized without 
delay ; and the name of the church changed to Santa 
Francesca Romana. 

The Saint had foimded a community of women, 
who are generally called the Oblates of Tor di 
Specchi, from the name of their principal convent. 
After the death of her husband, she retired thither, 
and made herself the least in the house. Her tomb 
was built from designs of Bernini in 1648, by a 
sister of Pope Innocent X., Donna Agata Pamphili, 
herself an Oblate. Meli's beautiful statue of St. 
Frances and her Angel is at the foot of the steps of 
her Confession, amid the usual circlet of lighted 
lamps. 

She wears the habit and the ample veil of the 
Oblates, and the grave sweetness of her aspect has 
been well expressed in the marble. 

The convent of the Oblates on Via Tor di Specchi, 
was not far from the Minerva. My limited time did 
not, however, permit me to visit it, much as I desired 
this privilege, after reading Lady Fullerton's descrip- 
tion of its bright and beautiful interior, and the 
souvenirs of St. Frances to be seen there. It stands 
in a very close built part of old Rome, a narrow 

73 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

street running up almost in front of it to the famous 
Tarpeian rock. 

So do the ancient, the mediaeval, and the modern, 
crowd on one another in Rome, suggesting the 
strangest contrasts and comparisons. The Roman 
nobility, which claims descent not from the Roman 
Emperors, but from the much more ancient Roman 
kings, keep the tokens of their antiquity, even in such 
names as Flavia and Tullia for their daughters. Did 
the Vestal Virgins of their Pagan days in some sort 
prefigure the Oblates ? 

The Oblates do not make the three vows of religion, 
but simply a promise of obedience to the Mother 
President. They may go forth from the convent, 
with due permission, may enjoy their income, etc. 
The membership is restricted to women of the higher 



The convent affords the privileges of a devout life, 
and a not too rigorous seclusion to ladies who do not 
feel called to the complete renunciations of the Evan- 
gelical Counsels ; and the providing of this " middle 
state," so to speak, where such ladies can live holy 
lives and utilize their gifts in the educational work of 
the Church, is another proof of the largeness of the 
Church's mind. 

St. Frances is most distinctively "of Rome." It 
is said that she never left the city and its environs 
in her life. Her various residences and favorite 
places of prayer, her vineyards, the scenes of her 

74 



WELL* TRODDEN WAYS. 

miracles, are pointed out by the people as if she had 
died but yesterday. 

In her church is the tomb of Pope Gregory XI., 
by Olivieri. This was the Pope who restored the 
Papal court to Rome after its long exile in Avignon, 
through the urgency and with the help of St. Cath- 
erine of Siena. A bas-relief represents the Pope's 
triumphant return, with the saint, in her Dominican 
habit, preceding him. 

St. Catherine of Siena, though but an adopted citizen, 
is another very dear to the Romans. Her body rests un- 
der the High Altar of the Minerva, with ever-burning 
lamps at its head and feet and rich votive offerings. 

For a week she was my only woman friend and 
neighbor in Rome. 

Speaking of " citizen saints," and the antiquity of 
the special feeling for them in Rome, it may be re- 
called that after the Church had been established in 
peace and glory, the relics of St. Flavia Domitilla, 
a niece of the Emperor Vespasian, and of SS. Nereus 
and Achilles were brought from the Catacombs, to 
the church which bears the names of the two last. 
These holy remains were honored with a triumphal 
procession, and one of the inscriptions on the arches 
under which they passed, was this : " To St. Flavia 
Domitilla, and to the SS. Nereus and Achilles, the 
excellent citizens who gained peace for the Christian 
Republic at the price of their blood. " That was 
nearly fifteen centuries ago. 

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During the past year, the harvests at Viterbo were 
threatened. The Cardinal Archbishop ordered de- 
votions in honor of St. Rose of Viterbo. The har- 
vests were saved, and, indeed, were most abundant. 
Then the people were invited to give thanks to God 
for this mercy " granted through the intercession of 
our illustrious fellow-citizen, St. Rose." Isn't this a 
lovely touch of Christianized human nature? 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



VII. 

The Shadow of the Cross in Italian Sunshine. 

The Italians love life. They love to sit in the 
sun and listen to music. They love to dance and 
sing. They love beauty of body and soul. They 
revel in lovely scenery, and are delicately apprecia- 
tive of the beauty of art. They love to be in love. 
Is not Italy the land of Romeo and Juliet ? 

They shrink from everything that is painful or 
unlovely, and have euphemisms for death, like the 
Greeks. 

Yet they have a wonderful esteem for the relig- 
ious life of sternest bodily austerity. They are 
devoted to " hard saints," as we sometimes call them ; 
and will flock in crowds to gaze upon holy relics 
which are much more suggestive of the humiliations 
of the grave than of the triumphs of Heaven. 

In an earlier chapter, I spoke of St. Jerome as a 
favorite Roman saint. He is a favorite subject of 
the great artists, and sometimes the companion of 
St. Sebastian, the soldier, oftener of St. John the 
Baptist, in the decorations of churches and in sacred 
pictures generally. 

"St. Jerome's Last Communion," by Domeni- 
chino, in the Vatican Gallery, is one of the world's 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

greatest pictures. St. Jerome, when he was about 
to die, had himself carried into the church at 
Bethlehem, and knelt, supported by his attendants, 
to receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. It 
is hardly possible to imagine a more faithful image 
of old age, emaciation and fast-coming death. You 
can count the bones ; the thin old hair shows the 
death-sweat ; the mouth is sunken, the cheeks fallen 
in, the eyes filming, and over all the cold bluish-gray 
of dissolution. What a contrast to the strong, fair 
dignity of the young priest in his rich robes ; and 
the serene beauty of SS. Paula and Eustochium, 
who, kneeling, pray for the passing soul of their 
spiritual father ! The introduction of these saints is 
in one sense an anachronism, as they long preceded 
St. Jerome to the grave. He died a. d. 420. But 
the splendid faith in the Communion of Saints of 
these old Christian masters levelled the boimdary 
walls of time, and explains many a grouping of holy 
ones chronologically inexplicable. Why might not 
St. Paula have come from Heaven to the death-bed 
of her spiritual father and master in sacred lore? 
The lion is there in the foreground — such an amiable 
lion, with big, grieving brown eyes ! A copy of this 
great picture, in mosaic, is in St. Peter's. 

I recall, from a Florentine gallery, another St. 
Jerome in the Desert, a fearful picture of penance. 
The saint worn to the bone beats with a huge stone 
his fleshless breast, and the lion looks up as if in 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

alarmed protest against such extremity of self- 
inflicted suffering. 

The lion which is never absent from representa- 
tions of this saint, is accounted for by the legend 
that the poor beast came to the gate of the monas- 
tery with a thorn in his foot. All the monks 
naturally fled away ;. but Jerome extracted the thorn, 
and tended the wound till it was healed. The lion 
attached himself to the saint, and became a sort of 
guard — a very effective one ! to the humble property 
of the monastery. After the saint's death, it grieved 
its life away on his grave. 

In all the pictures of St. Jerome the physical 
signs of his penitential life are insisted upon ; but in 
many he has the Sacred Scriptures spread out before 
him, to commemorate the great work for which he is 
especially honored in the Church — his translation 
of the Bible, commonly called " The Vulgate." 

In the pictures of the desert-saint, we have the 
man of prayer and penance ; in the others, " the 
greatest doctor, divinely raised up to interpret the 
Scriptures ": to quote the praise of Holy Mother 
Church herself. What a grand figure he is in 
Raphael's " Disputa ! " Both aspects of the saint 
are harmonious. His was a tremendously strong, 
fierce nature — his lion is sometimes held to be 
merely a symbol of this — and it needed his auster- 
ities and prayerful solitude in Bethlehem, to drown 
the syren voices of the luxurious Roiua of his 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

youth ; to teach him to make the ancient classics in 
which his soul delighted, the servants of the Word 
of God ; and to fit him to transcribe the Book of 
Christ amid the very scenes of Christ's life and labors. 

By the way, have the semi-educated people who 
represent the Catholic Church as hostile to the Bible 
ever heard of St. Jerome? The Church ha'd things 
all her own way in these days, and if the Scriptures 
were hostile to her claims, would it not have been 
common prudence to have engaged St. Jerome to 
collect the various copies and feed them to his lion, 
instead of encouraging him to make this splendid 
authentic edition, ready to the hand of the monastic 
transcribers, or the type-setters of a later day? 

What was the sense, further, of employing sculptor 
and artist to make of Cathedral and monastery 
church a very Bible in stone and fresco and mosaic 
and stained glass, till the personages and events of 
Holy Writ were as well-known to the people as their 
family histories? 

But this is a digression. St. Jerome is also 
honored in the Church for his advocacy of the 
monastic life ; and he has a further claim on the 
consideration of our own age as a practical believer 
in the higher education of women. To what in- 
tellectual as well as spiritual heights he led Paula 
and her daughter Eustochium, Marcella, and other 
noble Roman ladies associated under his direction ! 
It was an austere training, but it did not wither the 
80 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

kindly human heart. What a beautiful letter the 
Saint of penance and study wrote to Paula on the 
death of her daughter ! 

The Church of St. Jerome in Rome is on the site 
of St. Paula's house ; and in the portico of the 
Church of St. Onofrio, served by Jeronymite 
Fathers, I have seen the beautiful frescoes by 
Domenichino, protected by glass, in which the 
epochs in the life of the Saint are eloquently pic- 
tured ; among them his vision of Judgment — won- 
drous commentary on the relative value of profane 
and sacred science, when comparison as of equals, 
instead of subordination as of handmaid to mistress 
is nsisted upon ! There are frescoes from the same 
hand of the Saints of the order, among whom Saints 
Paula and Eustochium are included. 

St. Onofrio, another saint of penance, is depicted 
in this stern character on the walls of the cloister, 
leading to the monastery. In this church, which is 
exceedingly rich in works of art, is the beautiful 
tomb of the poet Tasso and the tomb of the wonder- 
ful linguist, Cardinal Mezzofanti. 

We set out to speak of the Italian devotion to 
austere saints, and of the fruitfulness of this sunny 
land in heroes of penance. The shadow of the 
Cross lies large across its flowery meadows and vine- 
clad slopes, and if you listen well, the moan of the 
Miserere, the wail of the Dies Irce, will pierce 
through the music of the dance and the love-song. 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

It seems a far cry from St. Jerome to St. Paul of 
the Cross, but there is a connecting link in Rome, 
material as well as spiritual. 

Crowning the Coelian Hill in sight of the Coli- 
seum, the Forum, the Arch of Constantine and many 
of the most interesting ruins of ncient aRome, 
stands the Church of SS. John and Paul (San Gio- 
vanni e Paolo), erected by Pammachus, the friend of 
St. Jerome. 

SS. John and Paul were Romans, brothers, and 
officers in the service of Constantia, daughter of 
Constantine. For their fidelity to their Faith they 
incurred the wrath of Julian the Apostate, but they 
were popular men, and — like the prefect in the case 
of St. Cecilia^ — he feared the consequences of a pub- 
lic execution. So the executioners were sent to behead 
them privately in their own house. The church is 
erected where the house once stood, and the very 
stone on which the saints were beheaded is to be seen 
in the centre of the floor, surrounded by a railing, 
and bearing this inscription : "Locus Martyrii SS. 
Joannis et Paolo in cedibus pro])riis." 

The church has a twelfth century bell-tower which 
reminds you of similar ones seen in England ; and 
while you are thinking of this, somebody tells you 
that the ancient granite columns in the portico are 
contemporary, the gift of the only English Pope, 
Adrian IV. 

This church is served by the Passionist Fathers, 
82 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

whose monastery adjoins it ; and last year, the pres- 
ence of the Very Rev. Father Fidelis (Dr. James 
Kent Stone, author of " The Invitation Heeded,") 
who was filling- the office of Consultor-General, and 
attending to the interests of the English-speaking 
provinces of the congregation, was a magnet for 
American visitors. 

He was very kind to the Bostonian, and you must 
know how she saw him in his fortress-like sanctuary. 

Out by the Coliseum, under historic arches, along 
by venerable ruins which, like the Coliseum, have a 
flora of their own, up a steep cobble-stone road to 
the hill-top, and out at the monastery door. 

As I knew no better, I rang the monastery door- 
bell, which woke echoes from long and hollow dis- 
tances. A young poor woman with a sickly little 
girl climbed the hill and sat down in the sun on the 
door-step. I saw a little aperture in the door with a 
slide back of it. Hence, in mediaeval fashion, food 
is passed out to the poor, and these were the advance 
guard of the monastery's beneficiaries. 

Presently a small door in the other side of the 
wall opened, and a grizzly old serving man, suggest- 
ing a fierce little ferret, looked out between the bars. 

Perceiving that it was a woman, not after the dole, 
he shut the door with a snap, giving barely time for 
my meek articulation of " Father Fidelis." 

In the sunny and oppressive silence, I heard his 
retreating footsteps on the flags, and by-and-by, a 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

double pair of advancing footsteps. In a moment, a 
majestic Passionist stood in the open doorway, and my 
friend beside him, with serious face but laughing eyes, 
properly directed the footsteps that had gone astray. 

"Go down the hill, walk on a little on the road, 
climb the other lull, and stand at the iron railing in 
front of the church. The man will go over and 
open it, and admit you." 

These rites duly performed, I was received at the 
threshold of the church, within which the sacristans 
were busy, and taken to one of the reception rooms 
opening off it. 

Herein I relieved my mind, as to the superiority 
of any and all American monasteries and convents 
over their European elder brothers and sisters, before 
I told Father Fidelis of the fortunes of his regiment, 
the Second Massachusetts in the Spanish- American 
War; but I have not learned that my well-meant 
suggestions have led to any radical changes at San 
Giovanni e Paolo. 

It was a fitting thought to place this austere abode 
in the midst of the remains of the architectural 
wonders of the old civilization, and the most beauti- 
ful scenery. There is abundant food for meditation 
on the fleeting vanity of the world ; and — was it 
St. Teresa who spoke of breakfasting on a beauti- 
ful landscape ? 

The dwellers in this monastery do so habitually, 
I believe ; and almost any Italian can do it often. 

84 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

But I fear the American would never rise above 
wanting coffee and rolls thrown in. 

Yet the Passionists are a modern order. St. Paul 
of the Cross, their founder, finished his mortal course 
in the year of the Declaration of American Inde- 
pendence. His was a life lived in presence of Christ 
on the Cross — an almost incredibly penitential life 
— and the aim of the brethren of the Congregation 
which he founded is to live and preach Christ cruci- 
fied to a world self-indulgent and weak of faith. 

This Passionist Congregation would be the last, 
one would say, for utilitarian and pleasure loving 
America, for France, for England, yet how it has 
flourished in all these countries ! It has consecrated 
our own hill-tops with its Retreats, its every pulpit 
a Calvary ; and its conquests everywhere are not 
merely the better life of hereditary Catholics, but 
many and eminent converts. North America has 
sent it to South America — a most welcome gift. 

Father Fidelis showed me the splendid chapel of 
St. Paul of the Cross, built in 1868, and the em- 
balmed body of the Saint under the altar. The thin, 
aged face has the gentlest and kindest expression. 
How strange it must seem to this lover of poverty, 
that his body should rest in death amid the glory of 
gold and silver and rarest marbles, with lamps forever 
shining before it ! But " their sepulchres shall be 
glorious," said the Holy Spirit, of men like St. Paul 
of the Cross. 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Here we saw the twin columns of gold and white 
alabaster, soon to become familiar to us in other 
shrines. The Khedive of Egypt gave twelve, I 
think, of these to Pope Pius IX., and the two above- 
mentioned were the Pope's gift to this chapel. 

The Cross was a sign of light in a dark sky to 
Constantine. It comes as a saving shadow across 
the world's glare to other eyes. But whether as 
light or shadow, it is the Conqueror's Sign in Italy 
and in the world. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



IX. 

Benedetto and Others. 

He used to come into the reading room for his com- 
radely lesson in English, from his dear house-friend, 
who was also the well-tried friend of the Bostonian. 
And so, we all three became comradely, in those 
pleasant evenings after dinner, when we chatted, with 
pauses for a glance at the newspapers, or a sip of 
coffee, at the little round tables, the tinkling of the 
fountain making a subdued accompaniment to our 
words and thoughts. 

He was in his early twenties, of medium height, a 
clear olive pallor, large lustrous slate-colored eyes, and 
a bearing marked by an unmistakable, though digni- 
fied and unobtrusive satisfaction in having been born 
a Roman. 

He was of a child-like innocence and a phenomenal 
inexperience in the ways of the world ; without the 
faintest conception of what the manner of life might 
be outside of Rome or a typical Italian town ; with 
as keen a sense of humor as an Irish or American 
youth might have, — held in check, however, by a 
reverent spirit, and the sweetest inborn courtesy and 
consideration ; intellectually keen, hard-working, de- 
vout, with an ascetical tendency. At the age of four- 
teen, he had left home to join an austere religious 

87 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

order. Brought back because his family needed his 
services, he had fitted himself for his filial duty, and 
become an efficient clerk in the government's service 
in Rome. 

He had some thought of going to America, if his 
dear comrade and his family would go too. Hence 
his special interest in learning English ; although 
these Continental folk acquire a language on general 
principles, at every opportunity and with the greatest 
ease. 

Benedetto, however, did not admire the English 
language, nor did he admire the people to whom it 
was native, except in a very discriminating manner, 
and with somewhat of benevolent condescension. 

There was something to be said in justification of 
his attitude. At the time of which I write, a party 
of English Non-conformist tourists had possession of 
the house. It is true that they had their own dining- 
room, and a clergyman of their own persuasion to 
head their austere table; but in the evening they 
poured into the common reading-room and distinctly 
depressed the temperature. 

You remember, perhaps, how the ingenuous John 
Ridd in " Lorna Doone " used to distinguish the 
Catholics in a public gathering — they looked well- 
nourished and as if they were having a good time. 
This was when English Protestantism was deeply 
tinged with the Puritan spirit. 

He could have separated his Protestants and Cath- 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

olics on the same simple plan, at any time during the 
stay of these tourists, as we had not more than one 
or two Episcopalians to shade off with in between. 

Never have I seen thinner and grimmer women. 
All of them, apparently, had been born middle-aged 
and critical. They were angular and badly dressed, 
and the men matched them in all things. They dis- 
approved of Rome, of its Basilicas, of its art galleries, 
of its ruins — they " did " them all in a week — most 
of all, of its people. 

" Nothing can change my mind about the Catholic 
Church, " declared one especially severe-looking 
woman, after a visit to the grandeur and radiance of 
St. Peter's. I fear she held the Pope personally re- 
sponsible for the condition of every tiny Roman who 
looked as if it needed a bath. 

Well, Benedetto would contemplate these people, 
through his long lashes, and in long silence of even- 
ings, to the manifest detriment of his lessons. For- 
tunately, his knowledge of English was too limited 
for him to understand their talk. Fortunately, per- 
haps, for them also, his occasional ejaculations were 
equally lost on them. 

Sometimes, we would see a painful contraction of 
his smooth forehead, as some particularly disagree- 
able tourist did some particularly awkward act, and 
he would murmer softly : " O Madonna Santa ! " or 
- Santa Maria ! " or " Mama Mia ! " 

But with native consideration and chivalry he was 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

tender to the womankind, no matter how unpleasant 
they might be in aspect or bearing. 

I ventured a remark to him once which almost any 
American youth would have appropriated as a just 
tribute to his own personal fascinations. But he 
repelled it sweetly — 

" We do not give good things to donkeys," he said. 

All this time the British men and maids were 
superciliously pitying the benighted Italian ! 

Benedetto had all the Italian passion for physical 
beauty ; and the conviction, of course, that the Italian 
type is the model of all beauty. If the child of an 
Italian mother happens to be unbeautiful, she is 
likely to regard it as a mark of God's displeasure. 
But nearly all Italian children are beautiful ; and the 
young girls and the women in their early twenties, 
have glorious dark eyes, soft, delicately-tinted skin, 
and beautiful curves and dimples. I never knew 
what the poets meant by " dusky " hair, till I saw it 
waving back from the broad low foreheads of Italian 
girls. It is not the black, solid, smooth, shining, hair 
of the north, but a soft, fluffy growth that shades 
away from the clear olive brow and temples in a 
quite indescribable manner. And then the tragic, 
fateful sort of beauty on some of those softly shaded 
faces! 

To be sure, the Italian women of the humbler 
classes mature early and fade early ; and it is hard 
to believe that any of the witchlike crones you see in 

90 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

the doorways of poor tenements could ever have re- 
sembled their cherubic grandchildren playing on the 
street. But these women have had their beauty and 
enjoyed it to the full, and take a disinterested pleas- 
ure in seeing the later flowering of their inherit- 
ance. 

Benedetto was interested in America, in view of 
his possible emigration thither ; but it was clear that 
he had the vaguest ideas even of the mere extent 
and wealth of the Land of the Free. 

So I tried to give him some points as to our mani- 
fold natural advantages, the size and splendor of our 
cities, the race-lines of our citizenship, citizen oppor- 
tunities, etc., etc. He listened as if some credible 
person were describing the manner of life in the 
planet Mars. 

In the small matters of life, Americans were 
always exciting his wonder. He could not under- 
stand, for example, our fondness for animals. In 
Rome there are so many bambinos to be petted, that 
there is little affection left to be spent on the backs 
of dogs and cats. 

I experimented on a Roman cat, and it turned on 
me a face of mingled surprise and alarm, that I shall 
never forget. The cats in the Vatican gardens, how- 
ever, were sleek and fat and evidently used to notice ; 
for four came up to us together one day to be petted — 
voluntary victims. 

Benedetto was too polite ever to manifest surprise 
91 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

at anything his friends thought proper to do ; 
though it was certainly a problem to him that we 
could amuse ourselves for an hour with the antics of 
the little dogs of the Minerva. 

But one day, when we were driving in the neigh- 
borhood of St. Peter's and one of the party was 
diverting the rest — we had had many hours of 
strenuous sight-seeing — by noting every stray dog, 
cat, and donkey on the road, Benedetto sat silent as 
his wont was, but with a look of amiable satisfaction 
on his pleasant face, till he, too, was appealed to on 
the appearance of about the fifty-first cat on our line 
of vision. 

" But there are so many cats," he said, kindly, 
though with a weary smile. 

Whereupon I told him of the Boston lady who 
left a fortune to endow a home for cats. 

" It is another world," he answered, trying hard 
not to look shocked — for was not the Signorina 
also a Bostonian ? and we heard no more from 
Benedetto the rest of the evening — not even when 
we reminded him of the Madonna's cat in Barocchi's 
" Annunciation " in the Vatican. 

What an experience it would be, if exchange of 
personalities could be made among us, to see 
America with Benedetto's ingenuous eyes ! 

If it were possible for English self-satisfaction to 
receive a salutary check, it should be in Italy. 
English institutions, even Royalty itself, is a joke in 

92 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

France, but the Englishman, pure and simple, is the 
clown of the Italian stage. 

The Italian is utterly unimpressed by the English- 
man's serious self-importance. To the Italian, the 
Englishman is not a scholar because he is not a 
linguist ; he is not a Christian, because he is not a 
Catholic. 

If an Italian wants to amuse a group of friends 
he " does the Englishman " for them. This consists 
in showing the Englishman on a visit to one of the 
great churches, for example. He does not recognize 
the sacred places ; he goes coldly by the favored 
shrine of the Madonna ; he blunders into forbidden 
spots, and when the sacristan comes forth to warn 
him off, courteously, but with an infinity of gesture 
and grimace, he raises his monocle, drops his mouth, 
and stares uncomprehendingly before him. The 
Italian can do this last to perfection. 

In an Italian theatre in a rural town, the play is 
such as will appeal to the country-folk of Romeo 
and Juliet. But just when every one is wrought up 
to concert pitch, when the men are wiping their 
eyes, and the women faint with emotion, the curtain 
falls and rises again on the British father of a 
family stalking across the stage, with monocle, side- 
whiskers and silk hat, followed by his stout little 
wife, who looks just like Queen Victoria, and five or 
six lanky sons and daughters with their Bsedeckers 
and umbrellas. The tension is at once relieved ; the 

93 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

English are duly put through their paces, the 
Italian, of course, always "getting the best" of 
them, and every one goes home happy. 

Invariably throughout Italy, the advertisements 
of the various tourists' agencies display the British 
husband and wife, as already described, with their 
tall, narrow-shouldered daughter, with sailor-hat, 
shirt-waist and guide-book, standing between them. 
All three, with their mouths dropped at precisely the 
same angle, are staring at the rising sun. The 
Italians thus assert their superiority; the English 
do not always understand, and don't worry when 
they do, and. everybody is happy. 

The trouble is, though, that the Italian seldom 
distinguishes between the people of England and the 
people of English speech. 

" But I am not English, I'm Irish," says one. 

"And I am not English, but American," says 
another. 

But the bi-lingual salesman and guard, and the 
polyglot proprietor and conductor, only shrug their 
shoulders. 

Three nations, and all with the same language ! 
It is too difficult. 

To be sure, there are peculiarities by which after 
a time an American may be distinguished. 

The average Englishman frankly takes no trouble 
to make one understand his barbarous tongue. He 
thinks every one should know it. 

94 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

The American, on the contrary, thinks he can 
make one understand by talking loud. 

The American sits in long rows at luncheon or 
dinner, drinking cold water. The Englishman does 
not do this incredible thing ; nor, on the other hand, 
is he so lavish of his lire to waiters and porters. 

The Englishman, by the way, has his own opinion, 
not a favorable one — of his alleged "cousin," who 
has taught hotel-keepers to put the vin ordinaire 
among the extras, and servants to expect large 
gratuities. 

He can hardly be blamed. How delightful it 
was at that little inn with the grand name, up in the 
Savoy Alps, where the English and Americans seldom 
rested — where they gave you a better dinner than 
you would ordinarily get in Paris, wine included; 
the softest of beds, though you had to get up on a 
chair to climb into it, and a wax candle as thick and 
nearly as long as a broom-stick ; where they wel- 
comed you and served you as if you had come down 
from Heaven to them ; and where on your bill, there 
were but seventy-five centimes for extras. Such places 
are growing fewer and further between year by year. 
Shall any at all be left, after our quarter of a million 
Americans have been at the Paris Exposition ? 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



X. 

Jerusalem in Rome. 

" If I were of the Jewish race, I should be the 
proudest man in the world!'' said John Boyle 
O'Reilly. 

A friend present begged to know if it were possible 
to elevate race-pride to the nth power ; as anything 
to exceed Mr. O'Reilly's pride in his Irish blood had 
not come under his rather extensive observation. 

Another recalled the tradition of the descent of 
the Irish race from the Lost Tribes of Israel, and 
suggested some striking points of resemblance between 
the Chosen People of the Old Dispensation, and the 
Chosen People of the New. 

" Modest ! that latter term of comparison ! " said 
another. 

" Seriously, though," continued Boyle O'Reilly, 
" what a grand thing to be of the race which gave 
Moses to the world ; and " very reverently, " of which 
Christ Himself came." 

Then we all agreed that the ideal thing were to be 
of the Jewish blood and the Christian Faith. 

I thought of all this in Rome, one day, in the 
Church of S. Andrea della Frate, at the Shrine of 
the Blessed Mother of God, in which she herself 
appeared to Alphonse Ratisbon, the Jew, who becom- 

96 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

ing a Christian, subsequently founded the Order of 
our Lady of Sion. 

I think the Jews, even those who are most obdurate 
in their antagonism to Christianity, have nevertheless 
an intense pride in the fact that it is from their race 
— all fallen and proscribed though it be today — that 
the Christ of the Christian's love and hope has come. 
You can find it in the impassioned poems of Emma 
Lazarus, of whom, by the way, it is whispered that 
she died a Catholic. 

I recall the story of the Jewish merchant, in one 
of the great Catholic cities of Europe, who, on the 
occasion of a public observance of some festival of 
the Blessed Mother of God, felt that it would be 
unwise for him to let his establishment, the largest 
and finest in the city, remain dark amid the multi- 
tude of illuminated buildings. So he illuminated, like 
the rest ; but he also saved his pride of race. Tow- 
ering over all other festal devices, he had above his 
building in letters of light the name, " Mary," and 
just below, in equal radiance, the inscription, "She 
Was a Jewish Woman." 

Another characteristic story is told in one of 
Theodora L. Teeling's charming sketches, of Father 
Hermann, a converted Jew, who entered the Carmel- 
ite Order. At the visit of some great dignitary to 
the house of the Order in Paris, Father Hermann 
and two other priests, also converted Jews, were 
standing together under the Crucifixion in the assem- 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

bly room. The dignitary approached this group, 
and the Superior, presenting them by name, added : 

"Three sons of Abraham — " 

" Four ! " said Father Hermann, with a magnifi- 
cent gesture towards the Crucifix. 

In Heaven itself, amid the hosts of the redeemed, 
there are many souls to thrill with a double pulse of 
exultation on those days when, at a myriad Chris- 
tian altars, the priest intones the Gospel beginning, 
"The genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, 
the son of Abraham." 

Who cannot, therefore, sympathize with Pascal 
when he says that the Christian attitude to the Jews 
should be one of "chivalrous antagonism !" 

Certainly in Rome, even during the comparatively 
brief existence of the Ghetto — Paul IV., 1555, to 
Pius IX., 1848 — and its discriminatory statutes, the 
Jews were better treated than anywhere else in 
Europe. Even in the Ghetto, they were in some 
measure a self-governing community, and the laws of 
Rome secured their abodes to them on perpetual 
leases, thus protecting them against the possible 
caprice or rapacity of Christian landlords. There 
have been Jewish settlements in Rome since the days 
of Pompey the Great, but the first Jews were 
brought thither as slaves. The Jews lived on imder 
the Pagan Emperors with varying fortunes, con- 
founded in the beginning of Christianity with Chris- 
tians, as Jews and Christians equally refused to pay 

98 



WELL TRODDEN WAYS. 

divine honors to idols or to Emperors ; later oppos- 
ing the Christians with their own small strength ; 
still later, before the abolition of Pagan power, suf- 
fering banishment, or mayhap worse, in some sort 
like the Christians. 

In the early days of Christian power, and even in 
the thirteenth century, they lived in considerable 
numbers and prosperity in Rome, and the Pope's 
physician was oftentime a Jew. 

In the days of St. Gregory the Great — sixth 
century — some over-zealous Christians attacked 
the Jews and captured their synagogues at Cappa- 
docia and Terracina. When this exploit was made 
known to the Pope, he at once bade the victors 
return this captured property to its lawful owners, 
observing, in effect, that coercion is not conversion; 
that men should be won to the True Faith by gentle- 
ness and charity. 

In later years, the stern Sixtus V. treated the 
Jews kindly because, as he reminded the Romans, 
they were u the family from whom Christ came." 

Always at the accesion of a new Pope, the freedom 
of the Jews to practice their religion was renewed 
with this ceremony : the Israelite school awaited his 
return from St. John Laterals, in a richly decorated 
balcony, and presented him with a copy of the Pen- 
tateuch, which he at once blessed, and took with him. 

Doubtless their faculty for money-getting and 
money-keeping, had something to do with the antag- 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

onism kept up so long against the Jews in all Chris- 
tian countries in the much enduring name of religion. 

Howbeit, in Rome, Pope Pius IX. destroyed the 
enclosure of the Ghetto, which no longer exists in 
its ancient form, and revoked every vestige of the 
laws which discriminated against the Jews. 

There are now several Jewish quarters in Rome, 
but they remain numerously in the neighborhood of 
the Ghetto and within its olden limits are two syna- 
gogues and several schools. 

Opposite to the place where stood the gate of the 
Ghetto, is the Church of the converted Jews. 

There is a painting of the Crucifixion on the out- 
side walls, and above its portals this inscription, 
taken from Isaiah, (Chapter LXV.) in Hebrew and 
in Latin : 

" I have spread forth my hands all the day to an 
unbelieving people, who walk in a way that is not 
good, after their own thoughts." 

It was almost twilight when we entered this little 
church — to which not one visitor in a hundred 
thousand ever thinks of going, as the Roman citizen 
told me — and I could not get a satisfactory view 
of it. 

The church is very small, but beautiful in marble 
and frescoes. The large frescoes on the side walls, 
as I remember them, commemorate the supper of 
St. Gregory, and the giving of the deed of the 
Church. 

100 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

What impressed me more than these, however, 
was the picture above the High Altar, which caught 
the fading light from the windows, and the upward 
gleam of the sanctuary lamp. It was the Eternal 
Father attended by angels. I know not what its 
artistic merit may be, but there is a beauty of fitness 
in it that goes to the heart, as if it said : " Fear not ; 
it is the Lord God of your Fathers who calls you 
thither." 

And the Madonna below with the Divine Em- 
manuel in her arms, is in her dark beauty a verit- 
able Daughter of Judea. 

A few devout women were praying before this 
little sanctuary. 

We looked into the synagogues near by, which 
were lighted for the evening service, and found only 
men on the lower floor. The women were in the 
galleries. A red curtain with symbolical devices 
embroidered in gold hangs before the recess, be- 
tween the marble columns in the wall opposite to 
the Rabbi's desk. It conceals what they call " the 
Holy of Holies," which contains among other ven- 
erated objects, a parchment copy of the Pentateuch. 

Among the decorations in the frieze and else- 
where are the seven-branched candlestick, the sacred 
vessels of Solomon's Temple, the Harp of David, etc. 

The Rabbi began the prayers in a mournful, 
long-drawn chant, and the men responded in the 
same key, with a curious minor fall at the end. 
101 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

It was to me all so inexpressibly dim sad, futile. 

Outside, about the thronged business stands, and 
the shabby houses, there was life and activity 
enough ; but sordid and unbeautiful — the utter 
humiliation of the Daughter of Sion. 

The actual confining walls of the Ghetto, which 
had their advantages and were not especially dis- 
tasteful to this proud and exclusive people, were not 
half so strong a barrier between them and the 
Christians, as those raised by their own obstinate 
spirits. Else never had there been a Ghetto. 

It seems incredible that in the place of all places 
where the sculptor's and the painter's art should 
have called all they who passed by the way to see 
the bond between the Old Law and the New in fig- 
ure and reality, in prophecy and fulfilment, Israel 
alone should continually go on with unseeing eyes 
and hardened heart ; that Abraham, and Moses, and 
David, and the prophets who wept over the foreseen 
obstinacy and final casting off of the Chosen People, 
should in vain beseech them to enter and see the 
glory of the Lord, and the honor of His servants — 
the men of their own blood — in the temples of the 
New Covenant. 

But so it is ; and this nineteen centuried obstinacy, 
this world-wide dispersion, this marvellous preserva- 
tion of the racial type and the Olden Law, in them- 
selves witness most powerfully — if unintentionally 
— for every claim of the New. 
102 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Then there is a promise and a hope dear to every 
Christian heart that shares the loving solicitude of the 
Heart of Christ for the people of whom He took His 
Humanity. 

Not forever vain the Divine entreaty, which cries 
through the Christian world at every recurrent 
Passion-tide : 

"Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! be converted to the Lord 
Thy God." 

They will come back, those erstwhile favored 
children, whom the Lord has preserved through all 
vicissitudes, after whom He yearns so fatherly. They 
will come back, albeit, late in the World's long day. 
And they will be established in their own land, and 
the unbloody Sacrifice which their prophet foresaw, 
shall be offered in the place of the ancient prefigur- 
ing victims. 

"And it shall come to pass in that day, that the 
Lord shall set His hand again the second time to 
recover the remnant of His people, which shall be 
left, from Assyria and from Egypt, and from Pathros 
and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, 
and from Hamath, and from the isles of the sea. 

And He shall set up a standard unto the nations, 
and shall assemble the fugitives of Israel, and gather 
together the dispersed of Judah, from the four 
corners of the earth." 

And in those days, Jerusalem and Rome shall sing 

the same hosannas to the Son of David. 
103 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XI. 

New Rome and St. Joachim's. 

One day, on the road between Genoa and Pisa, 
looking inward from the sea, I was painfully im- 
pressed by the less than half-cultivated aspect of the 
land, and the dilapidated look of the country 
villages. Nature had done so much ; men were 
doing so little. 

Dwellings were going utterly to ruin, or were 
repaired in a slovenly, half-hearted manner. The 
fields were lonely looking ; the olive and grape 
harvest rather scant ; even the little churches had 
an uncared for look, as if half the people had passed 
away, and none had come in to take their vacant 
places. 

The brilliant sunshine, and the fresh, fragrant air 
only intensified the sadness of the scene. 

Something of what I felt must have been evident, 
as I looked away again to the blue Mediterranean, 
for the Italian artist beside me said : 

" You are thinking of our badly tilled land and 
depopulated villages." 

He spoke English with great correctness, and 
only a slight accent, though he had never been in 
England or America. 

" Yes ; " I said, " what does it mean ? " 
104 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

"It means," he answered, bitterly, "our great 
navy, our standing army, the Triple Alliance — in 
other wods, a poor country trying to live on equal 
terms with rich ones." 

" Then," I said, " United Italy is a failure." 

" No, no ; " he answered, quickly, " I cannot 
grant that ; but we are the worst-governed country 
in the world. The men who ought to be tilling the 
fields and repairing the houses are forced into the 
army and navy. We gain nothing outside by our 
over-developed militarism ; and at home the land is 
going to ruin." 

I often heard similar sentiments after I arrived in 
Rome, and from persons, anti-Papal, as this young 
artist apparently was, as well as from the heartiest 
adherents of the Pope. 

Italy is depleted of the flower of her manhood ; 
over-taxed, half-cultivated and half-starved ; and the 
new education, because so tinctured with irreligion, 
is playing into the hands not of an enlightened 
popular movement for a gradual betterment of con- 
dition, but of a destructive anarchism, which would 
pull down what oppresses at the cost of any amount 
of incidental and uncalled-for destruction. 

The King would gladly have his people religious, 
if only religion in Rome did not necessarily involve 
a standing protest against the spoliation of the 
Patrimony of the Church. Religion is seen to be 
the only effective barrier against the destructive 
105 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

social forces : but it must be had at a smaller cost 
than the surrender of Rome to the Pope. When 
the day comes that the Government is willing to 
make the surrender, it may be too late for the safety 
of Rome ; or, the change of heart may come in 
obedience to some imperious political necessity 
which involves the solution of the Papal difficulty 
anyhow. 

Religion is taught in the State Schools, when the 
parents demand it. But the perfunctory catecheti- 
cal instruction may be given by an indifferent 
Catholic or by an infidel. In any event, nothing 
can be said which would bring into conflict the 
rights of the Pope and the claims of the King. 

Yet the Italians are Catholics — on certain points 
the Government is careful of their religious suscep- 
tibilties, as in the burial of Victor Emmanuel and the 
marriage of King Humbert's son. Queen Margharita 
is a devout woman, and would, it is said, do anything 
possible to soften the situation. 

" She might, then, have restored to the Pope his 
beautiful tapestries, which are kept in the State 
apartments in the Quirinal," said a keen little woman, 
Papalina to the last degree, and not at all placated 
by the Queen's occasional gifts to S. Silvestro. " She 
might do that little bit of reparation." 

Whether she could or not, the criticism is a fair 
evidence of the more devout Catholics' attitude to 
the Quirinal. 

106 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Many of them will not enter the court-yard of that 
palace, even with visitors out sight-seeing from foreign 
parts. 

Protestantism makes no real headway in Rome, for 
all of the occasional pretentious reports to remote 
missionary boards. 

Sometimes poor Italian children are drawn into 
sectarian Sunday-Schools with presents of new gowns 
or jackets, but such " conversions " are short-lived, 
and are poor returns for large investments of money 
and lung power. 

Protestant missionary activity in Catholic countries, 
however, has usually the effect of stirring up the 
Catholics themselves to greater interest in their own 
faith, and of making the shepherds of the flock beware 
of taking too much for granted, in the matter of the 
sufficiency of religious inheritance and environment. 

There are many things to which one may liken 
Rome religiously. The symbol uppermost in my 
mind this moment, is of a vast forest, wherein new 
trees are springing from the decaying trunks of old 
ones ; flowers forcing their way up among fallen 
leaves ; and opening buds and overripe fruitage on 
the self-same branch. 

The ancient orders for the redemption of captives 
have no longer their olden prominence in the sight of 
Christendom ; but Cardinal Lavigerie's White 
Fathers are prepared in Rome for the New Crusade 
for the redemption of slaves in Equatorial Africa. 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

The Government cripples the Church's exisiting 
educational system ; forthwith, religion devises new 
plans to meet the spiritual needs of the children who 
have no choice but to attend the Government schools, 
and of the youth, whose sole road to a career is 
through the State University. 

The Government closes a time-honored monastery 
or convent in Old Rome. Presently, a new monas- 
tery or convent springs up in New Rome or in the 
suburbs. Perhaps it is of Roman origin. Perhaps 
it is an offshoot from some prosperous French, or 
German, or English-speaking Institute, which desires, 
as they all desire, to have a home in sight of St. 
Peter's. 

Anyhow, the indestructibility of the Church's 
energy is constantly manifesting itself in the Eternal 
City, and vain the hope of those who look to see her 
failing with any national decadence whatever. 

One of the most gratifying evidences of the rising 
up of the Church to meet new conditions, is the mis- 
sionary work of the Redemptorist Fathers in New 
Rome. 

In many respects, New Rome contrasts favorably 
on the exterior with Old Rome. The streets are 
broad, well cared for and well lighted. 

Indeed, it may be said of Rome in its entirety, and 
of all the considerable Italian cities, that they are, pro- 
portionately, far better electric-lighted than London. 

The Government, however, has not succeeded as 
108 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

well in its efforts at " improving " Old Rome as in 
laying out the new portion of the city ; and even in 
this latter, there is sad evidence of the disastrous 
ending of sundry building " booms " just as Marion 
Crawford describes it in " Don Orsino." 

Alleged improvements in the Old City involve too 
often the knocking off of portions of houses, and the 
leaving of the broken walls and papered background 
of old bed-chambers. Instead of the quaint and 
decorous aspect of an older time, there are today 
whole streets which must be described as rubbishy- 
looking. 

In New Rome the inhabited buildings are whole 
and high, and shops with large glass windows abound. 
The wall-picture of the Madonna with the votive 
lamp before it is not seen, nor are cross-crowned 
edifices at first glance much in evidence. 

Yet as the Romans have moved out and built them- 
selves houses on the fields of Cincinnatus, the Church 
has gone with them. 

I wanted to see the great Papal Church of St. 
Joachim in Rome. 

" First," said the Roman citizen, " you must meet 
the rector, Father Palliola/' 

So we drove out one day, passing, as we did at 
every opportunity, the wonderful fountain of Trevi, 
on by the Quirinal, then to the new but already 
densely peopled and rather uninteresting section, 
once the " Prate " or Fields. 
109 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

At the very top of one of the apartment houses, 
with children playing all the way up the interminable 
nights, we found the modest dwelling place of fche 
Redemptorist Fathers in whose charge Pope Leo 
XIII. has placed the Church of St. Joachhn. 

A monastery on a top-flat in Rome ! It is a 
temporary arrangement of course, but, for the time 
being, it is there, perfectly monastic in spirit, if not 
in aspect. 

A friendly lay-brother admitted us into a tiny 
parlor, — the only portion of the flat accessible to one 
of the devout sex, and I noted the crucifix, the 
pictures of our Lady of Perpetual Help, and St. 
Alphonsns in death as he lies in his episcopal robes, 
taking long bodily rest, until the Judgment Day. 

Then Father Palliola came in with kindest greeting 
and gentle Italian hospitality, and he spoke a little 
to the Roman citizen of a protege of both for whom 
he was getting employment ; and to the American of 
the " Mission Church " in Boston, and of sundry dis- 
tinguished American Redemptorists. 

A middle aged man, whose kindly and tranquil 
nature has left him fresh and imworn after years of 
severe missionary labor in a great variety of climates ; 
quietly cordial in manner, full of considerate interest 
in his guest and the topics of the hour, Father 
Palliola is of the finest type of Italian churchman. 

As we went down the long stairs with him, on our 
way to St. Joachim's, the little children stopped to 
110 



WELL -TRODDEN WAYS. 

kiss his hand, and his passing was like that of a 
gleam of sunshine among them. 

St. Joachim's Church stands in an open space in 
the historic fields above referred to. 

It has an eventful history; but it is enough to 
recall here that more than a year ago — July 20, 
1898 — Pope Leo XIII. made the church over, free 
of debt, to the Congregation of the Most Holy 
Redeemer; and that the Redemptorist Rector-General 
forthwith appointed Father Palliola its first rector. 
The church is practically complete on the exterior; 
the High Altar is erected, and a few chapels equipped 
with essentials ; but most of the chapels still await 
benefactor nations for their furnishing 1 and adorn- 

o 

ment. 

For St. Joachim's is an International Church : a 
visible act of homage and reparation to the Blessed 
Sacrament from the nations of the earth. 

The grand mosaic on the facade of the church 
expresses this idea of world-wide perpetual adoration. 
The Blessed Sacrament is exposed on an altar. On 
one side of the altar kneels Pope Clement VIII., 
who instituted the Perpetual Adoration in Rome three 
hundred years ago. On the other side, kneels Pope 
Leo XIII. inviting the races of men to draw near. 
Shall we quarrel with the artist, Virginio Monti, for 
making the loveliest figure, in the most picturesque 
of modern costumes, represent Europe, while America 
is typified by the only Simon-pure American, an 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

aboriginal Indian, with sufficiently graceful drapery, 
and moccasins and feathers? Asia, who cradled 
mankind, is beautiful, venerable, mysterious. Africa, 
a somewhat idealized Ethiopian, is clothed with bar- 
baric splendor, and a lion at her feet. 

Adoring angels hover above : and in the niches on 
either side, are four saints who were in a peculiar 
way, Apostles of the Blessed Sacrament : St. Thomas 
Aquinas, St. Bona venture, St. Juliana of Liege, and 
St. Clare. 

Above all this, upraised on a pedestal of shields, 
rises the statue of St. Joachim, with the Child Virgin, 
his daughter. St. Joachim, as my readers know, is 
the Holy Father's patron saint, whose name he 
received in baptism, and to whom he has always had 
a deep devotion. 

The statue is in bronze, a patriarchal figure, ma- 
jestic, long-bearded. The little, slight, veiled Maiden 
stands beside him, like a lily in the shadow of an oak. 

So we have one of the last of the saints of the Old 
Law over the latest world-temple of the New ; a 
saint less favored than Zachary or Simeon, in that he 
lived not to see the dawning of the Light of the 
World in the eyes of his Mary's Son, but far more 
favored in the nearness of his blood to that of the 
World's Redeemer. 

Thus, too, is shown the continuity of the Visible 
Church, the Old Dispensation not destroyed but ful- 
filled — brightening and expanding into the New. 
112 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

The columns of Baveno marble which support the 
portico are the gifts of the Czar of Russia ; the doors 
of Cedar of Lebanon are from the Sultan ; the Py- 
renean marble of the walls, from the Queen Regent 
of Spain — personal associations violently dissevered 
elsewhere, but here abiding in architectural harmony. 

With the poetic beauty of appropriateness which 
is never so perfectly exemplified as in the Roman 
churches, we have beneath the mosiac figure of the 
Divine Redeemer, in the lunette over the portal, this 
inscription, taken from His discourse after the Last 
Supper : " Pater fuit inium sicut et nos unum sumus." 

(Father, that they may be one, as we also are One.) 

The fruit-bearing vine rising up from the Sacred 
Host winds the length of the entablature in circles, 
within every one of which is the name of a nation — 
I looked first for my own, of course — expressing 
again the unity for which Christ prayed, of all peoples 
in His Church : "I am the True Vine . . . abide 
in Me. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, 
unless it abide in the vine, so neither can you, unless 
you abide in Me." 

The vine, too, is one of the symbols of the Eucharist, 
so that this wonderful portico prepares you by Scrip- 
ture, tradition and history, by figure and symbol, 
setting forth in the majesty of marble and bronze, in 
the glory of fadeless pictures, the mysteries of the 
Faith, and preparing the soul for the adoration ever 
going on beyond these splendid portals. 
113 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Entering, one takes in the vastness of the dimen- 
sions of the church, the massiveness of its construc- 
tion^ the sombreness of the marbles, gray with dark 
veins throughout. There is nothing to arrest the 
steps or withhold the eyes from the rich sanctuary, 
shining out from its sombre approach between the 
dark, strong pillars. 

The outer roofing of the cupola is pierced with 
stars of yellow crystal, which let in the light through 
the corresponding stars of the inner roofing, so the 
effect, as you look up, is of a dark blue star-lit sky. 

The sanctuary railing is of red marble, inlaid with 
porphyry and giallo antico. The altar is of red 
marble, richly set with gold and gems. The mala- 
chite in the super-altar is another gift of the Czar's. 
In the colonnades on each side of the throne of the 
Exposition, we find again the gold and white alabaster 
"from the Khedive of Egypt. The great painting of 
the apse by Monti and Cisterna, is Christ giving to 
the Apostles their world-wide commission. Above 
the head of Christ we see the Eternal Father in the 
opening Heavens, the Holy Spirit in the form of a 
Dove, and adoring angels. 

The inscription above the sanctuary is the Prophecy 
of the Eucharist: "In omni loco sacrificatur et 
offertur nomini meo oblatio mundi " — " In every 
place there shall be sacrificed and offered to My 
Name a Clean Oblation." 

By some marvellous skill of the artificer, the 
114 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

marble of the sanctuary walls has the effect of vast, 
gray wide-drawn curtains. 

In brief all the precious and beautiful things of 
the world have been brought together in this sanctu- 
ary, in the spirit of David with the materials of the 
Temple, to give back to God of His own gifts, and 
to tell the doctrine and the poetry of the Holy 
Eucharist in the most splendid and enduring signs. 

"Rome is the poet among the churches," said 
James Russell Lowell, even with his Protestant mis- 
understanding of the things which fascinated his eyes. 

This church is the worthiest modern expression of 
the Faith in the Real Presence which renewed St- 
Peter's four hundred years ago, and covered all Central 
Europe and the Isles of the Sea with " c Credos ' in 
stone" — to borrow Father Hecker's words — at the 
first thousand years of the Christian Era, and a 
thousand years farther back put up modest altars 
and mystic symbols in the recesses of the Roman 
Catacombs. 

As the growth of the population in New Rome, 
witnesses against the alleged physical decline of the 
Italian people, so the building of St. Joachim's and 
the welcomed ministrations of the Redemptorists 
witness against the alleged decline of the Faith among 
them. 

It is the centre of the International Confraternity 
for the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacra- 
ment, and the nations of the earth are uniting in its 
115 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

completion, even to the ignoring of religious dividing 
lines, as we have seen. 

Finally, the church is a memorial of the golden 
jubilee of the episcopate of Pope Leo XIII. There 
are many visible memorials of his Pontificate in 
Rome, as his enlarging and enriching of St. John 
Lateran's, the Beda College for English converts, 
etc., but the Church of St. Joachim is the grandest 
and most significant of all. 

Most fortunate is it in the man chosen to carry 
out the Holy Father's plans in the completion of the 
church and to develop its spiritual purpose. Father 
Palliola's personality, international experience, devo- 
tion and disinterestedness are magnetic, and he will 
see the drawing of hearts to St. Joachim's as to the 
sign of the Faith and Hope of Rome's and the 
World's New Day. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



XII. 

Catholic Remains and Ritualist Churches in 
London. 

No one had told me of it ; it does not stand out 
in the pictures ; and I marvelled when the statue of 
the Blessed Mother with her Divine Child, met me 
at the portals of Westminster Abbey. 

" The Cathedral was St. Paul's, but the Abbey 
was Our Lady's and St. Peter's," explained a young 
and fervent Ritualist clergyman, later a sojourner at 
the same hotel in Rome, and who made a larger 
sign of the cross than any priest at the table. 

" These sixteenth century people should have done 
more — or less!" said another, "It was awkward 
to leave so many reminders of the old order, if 
they expected the new to prevail and stay." 

Nothing impressed me so much as this during my 
short sojourn in England; except, indeed, the de- 
liberate reversion to the Old Order, going on within 
the Anglican body itself ; and the evidence on every 
side of the reconquests which the Old Faith in its 
entirety is making. 

The modern Protestant parish churches keep the 
ancient Catholic names ; even of Our Lady and 
many saints of the Roman Calendar, including St. 
Bride, or Bridget. 

117 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

In the Abbey itself you are bewildered with in- 
consistencies, which no one has taken the trouble to 
remove, or cares to explain. Here in tomb and 
shrine, Catholicity leaves off, so to speak, and 
Protestantism begins in the next breath, without a 
word of explanation for itself. 

Now that there is no longer Altar nor Sacrifice, 
nor Sacramental Presence here, the holiest spot in 
this beautiful Temple is the shrine of St. Edward 
the Confessor, the last of the Saxon Kings. He 
was the founder of the Abbey, whose very existence 
testifies to the closeness of England's old-time union 
with Rome. 

His predecessors, probably from the middle of 
the seventh century, certainly, from the beginning 
of the ninth, had been ofttimes numbered among the 
pilgrims to Rome ; and when Edward was in exile 
in Normandy, he did the natural thing, in vowing a 
pilgrimage to the Tombs of the Apostles, if God 
would restore him to his kingdom. His prayer was 
heard ; but then came grave difficulties in the way 
of the fulfilment of his vow ; from which, therefore, 
the Pope, St. Leo IX., dispensed him, on condition 
that he would build or restore a monastery in honor 
of St. Peter. 

So, on the site of a previous monastery, built, 

perhaps, by King Sebert, early in the seventh 

century, under the same invocation — " a place of 

mine in the west of London which I chose and 

118 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

love" — as St. Peter in a vision, told the pious 
King, Edward built Westminster Abbey. It was 
greatly enlarged and enriched by subsequent Kings 
of England ; and but little of St. Edward's founda- 
tion remains. Here, however, he was buried, having 
passed away but eight days after the consecration of 
the Abbey. His tomb at once became a place of 
pilgrimage, wondrous miracles were wrought at it, and 
in 1163, he was duly canonized. A little more than 
a century later, Henry III. built the present chapel 
of the Confessor, and the blessed remains were 
translated to their new shrine ; the Saint signalizing 
the event by two miracles impartially in favor of an 
Englishman and an Irishman respectively. 

Despoiled as the shrine has been of votive offerings 
and ornaments, you can still see traces of the ancient 
mosaic and gilding on its rough brown surface. Still 
pilgrims come, but chiefly the curious, indifferent to 
that which makes the tomb holy. Sometimes, 
though, visitors come and quietly kneel undisturbed 
and almost unnoted — you do what you please in 
London, as, perhaps, nowhere else on earth — in prayer 
before the shrine ; and you cannot always tell, even 
when Roman collars are in evidence, whether they 
are Catholics or Ritualists. But it would be a 
thoughtless Catholic who would not breathe a prayer 
here for the return of England to the True Faith, 
and Mass once more under the glorious arches of 
Westminster Abbey. 

119 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

I visited the Chapels of the Kings alone at first, 
to think my own thoughts amid their sombre grand- 
eur. But I heard a verger doing the honors once, 
and I could not resist joining a party. 

They seemed to be decent English people from the 
country, matter-of-fact and a little dense. The 
Britisher of this class lives in the present. He has 
apparently neither the imagination nor the historical 
perspective of many, even of the illiterate, across the 
Irish Sea. 

This especial party heard with profound interest, 
and seemingly for the first time, the verger's oft-told 
tale. 

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the verger, as we 
stood in the chapel of Henry VII., " This is the tomb 
of Mary Stuart, commonly called Mary Queen of 
Scots. This is her heffigy on the tomb. She was 
beheaded under Queen Helizabeth. This tomb was 
put up by Mary's son, James I. of England and VI. 
of Scotland." 

The party examined the " heffigy " — a full length 
reposing figure of the beautiful and unfortunate 
Queen — carefully. Then the verger moved on a few 
paces : 

" Ladies and gentlemen, this is the tomb of Queen 
Mary, sometimes called « Bloody Mary,' and her sister 
Queen Helizabeth. This is the heffigy of Helizabeth. 
There is no heffigy of Mary. This tomb was put up 
by James I. of England and VI. of Scotland/' 
120 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

" I should think he'd a' been ashamed to put up a 
tomb to the woman who killed his mother," spoke up 
a man near the verger, with all the honest indigna- 
tion which might have been aroused by the record of 
some remarkably unfilial conduct in that morning's 
Times. 

Nobody disputed his sentiment, and the verger went 
on with his little stories, leaving every one to account 
for James' diplomacy, and the differences between 
Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, or to speculate on the 
unseemliness of their association in the grave, as he 
pleased. 

That was characteristic. In England certain facts 
speak for themselves in memorials or records. The 
native attitude is : " There they are ; make what you 
like of them." Nobody helps or hinders you by 
trying to explain violent contrasts or wild inconsist- 
encies. 

You think of this again in the lofty and beautiful 
Chapter House of the Abbey — where the Commons 
held their sessions from 1377 till the time of Edward 
VI. — and where the succession of Kings, Primates 
and Abbots is told in the pictured windows. In due 
course, in the lower panel of one you come on 
" Richard Whiting, Abbot ; " in the very next, on the 
first Dean of Westminster, and thence it is Deans to 
the present. But no one stops to say why Abbots 
ceased and Deans began. 

Would that one might look back and see West- 

121 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

minster Abbey in, let us say, the first years of Henry 
VIII. — or, indeed, at any time before its final dese- 
cration ! Most majestic is the Abbey itself, and 
beautiful with a sombre, pensive and stately beauty. 
The rich, dark brown hue of everything in its archi- 
tecture and sculptures ; the sunshine (when there is 
any), warmed into myriad hues through the glorious 
windows, and looking like broad shafts of solid radi- 
ance under the far-away arches, make all your up- 
looking a delight. 

But not all on a lower level is fit for this housing. 
Some of the tombs are hideous ; , how hideous you 
realize fully after you have seen the monuments in 
the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, and St. Peter's 
Rome. 

The monuments of the old Catholic days have a 
certain dignity. Then they often brought sculptors 
and artists from Italy. But ugliness entered with 
Protestantism. 

Catholic Art invested Death with a certain mys- 
terious beauty, and an active faith in the Communion 
of Saints has been the mother of some of the loveliest 
artistic expressions in painting and sculpture. 

Think of the beautiful Death on Canova's tomb of 
Pope Clement XIII. , in St. Peter's, a symbolic fem- 
inine figure with torch reversed, and a sleeping lion 
at her feet, as lovely as Religion on the same tomb, 
with glowing face uplifted, and cross and chalice in 
her hands — as you look at some of the savage Gothic 
122 i 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

suggestions of the victory of the grave in Westminster 
Abbey. Verily, the devout, artistic suggestiveness 
of death is gone when one writes no longer on the 
tomb of the beloved or honored dead — " Requiescant 
in pace /" 

Fear not, dear reader ; I am not going to describe 
Westminster Abbey ! While I was in London, I 
got into the way of dropping in for an hour or two, 
and storing corners and vistas in my mind, as you 
have done, or will do ; but these are for my own 
private and exclusive picture galleries. 

Of course, I found Longfellow's bust in Poet's 
Corner, and remembered the wreath which John 
Boyle O'Reilly sent thither for it. I marvelled 
at once at the utter inadequacy of Shakespeare's 
statue, and at the fitness of the lines on the scroll in 
his hand : 

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself — 
Yea, all that it inherits shall dissolve, 
And, like the airy fabric of a vision, 
Leave not a wrack behind. 

And I foimd the grey slab over Gladstone's grave, 
and said Requiescant there. 

When I arrived in London, the Ritual controversy 
was raging. Mr. John Kensit, self-constituted 
champion of ultra-Protestantism, by his ferreting 
out of Ritualist churches, and his violent interrup- 
tions of their services, had succeeded at least in 
123 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

focussing public attention on the number of such 
churches, and the marvellous approximation of their 
form of public worship, to that of the Catholic Church. 

* I bethought me to visit some of the churches 
which had excited the wrath of Mr. Kensit. Like the 
Catholic churches, they are, as a rule, hospitably open 
all day, and the vergers are more than amiable. 

I began with St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate. It 
was at St. Cuthbert's that Mr. Kensit interrupted 
the Veneration of the Cross on the Good Friday 
preceding, and was making off with the crucifix, 
when he was very properly arrested and committed 
to jail for disturbing public worship. St. Ethel- 
burga's was the scene of his second attempt, when he 
came to the Sunday morning service, and made a 
charge of assault at the nearest police station, because 
he had come in the way of a few drops of " holy 
water " at the Asperges ! 

St. Ethelburga's is a very small church in the 
midst of shops. You would pass it a hundred times 
unnoticed. On the interior, it is like a very poor 
convent chapel. There is a crucifix on the altar, 
neat altar cloths and frontal, candlesticks, and, on 
the day of our visit, there were two vases of white 
asters. There was a picture of Saint Ethelburga, 
standing beside the Blessed Virgin. A processional 
cross stood in the corner of the sanctuary, and several 
small lamps were alight. 

*My visit was made in September, 1898. 
124 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

There was a large window mostly of plain glass, 
but having a few small panes of very beautiful 
ancient stained glass, with scenes from the life of the 
patron saint. 

The verger took us into the sacristy, and showed 
us the vestments — my companion was an English 
convert of many years — and rejoiced greatly at our 
testimony to their identity with ours. 

On another day, I visited St. Alban's, Holborn. 
This is a beautiful church in a poor tenement dis- 
trict. The Ritualists gravitate to the poor. On a 
white marble slab, above the the main entrance, is 
this inscription : 

"Erected by a Merchant of London, for the 
Poor of Christ Forever." 

Most Ritualist churches are truly described as 
more or less like Catholic churches. But St. Alban's, 
at the first glance at the interior, showed no point of 
essential difference. There was everything that 
Catholic eyes are used to, even the Way of the 
Cross. The Rood Screen though faithful to ancient 
Catholic usage, is not, of course, familiar to American 
Catholics, nor are the seven lamps burning before 
the altar. But a profusion of lamps is common in 
Catholic churches abroad, not only on the Continent, 
but in England and Ireland. We noted four before 
the altar in the lovely little St. Ethelreda's Church, 
Ely Place, London ; and two Scriptural " seven- 
branched candlesticks," though with tiny ever-burning 
125 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

lamps instead of candles, before the High Altar in 
the Brompton Oratory. 

So St. Alban's was only in good Catholic fashion. 
It was a most devont-looking church. St. Alban's 
schools for boys and girls joined on to it. Presently 
I heard the closing prayers. The teacher came to 
"Hail, Mary," and, in a moment, there was the 
familiar response, " Holy Mary, Mother of God." I 
felt, for an instant, quite at home. 

The verger showed me the memorial chapel of the 
founder. Here the funeral " Masses " are celebrated. 
This is the church whose exceedingly Catholic prayer- 
books for children were being reviewed in column 
lengths in the London Times about these days. 

I saw St. Mary Magdalene's, Munster Square. It 
is larger and richer than St. Alban's, and almost 
indistinguishable from a Catholic church. Its par- 
ishioners are very fond of its beauty and of the 
" Catholic" services. I think the mothers of this 
parish frighten naughty children with the name of 
John Kensit. 

"But if he dares to come here disturbing the 
peace, our men will be ready for him," said one 
comely British matron to me. 

I strayed into a beautiful choral service at All 
Saints'. This is not quite so advanced, though the 
nuns in their dark gray habits and long black veils, 
marshalled their flocks of school children quite as 
our own do ; the women courtsied before the altar and 
126 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

prayed long and fervently on their knees. There 
were lamps galore and very beautiful frescoes all 
about the walls, depicting the blessedness of the 
saints in glory. Still there were no Way of the 
Cross nor confessionals in sight. 

To all of these churches the people flock, well-to- 
do and poor alike. Their clergy are ever in attend- 
ance. They are in strong contrast with some of the 
cold old English Protestant type, like St. Bride's, 
without even a candlestick on the communion table ; 
or St. George's, from whose " hard Protestant 
doors," as Tennyson would put it, I saw a poor 
young mother carrying her baby. 

" This is the third time I've brought him to be 
christened, and here again they've just locked the 
doors." And it was still quite early Sunday after- 
noon. 

But the Ritualistic churches are levelling up most 
of the other Anglican Churches, and what was dis- 
tinctly " High Church," a few decades ago, is ordi- 
nary now. 

St. Paul's Cathedral itself has a magnificent 
sculptured Crucifixion on its high altar. The erec- 
tion of it nearly occasioned a riot, but it worries few 
people today. A Catholic, seeing all these signs of 
the times, prays and hopes. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XIII. 
A Glimpse of The Second Spring. 

The autumn sunshine over London was pale and 
lonesome to eyes used to the radiant sunshine of 
America. When the fog began in November, the 
sun showed through like a globe of gold, shorn of its 
beams. But ever to me, the sky was opener and the 
light clearer about Westminster, and about the 
Brompton Oratory. 

The Oratory is, thus far, the largest and most 
beautiful Catholic church in England. The new 
Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Westminster, whose 
walls were more than half way up at the time of my 
visit, will be larger ; and the church which the 
Duke of Norfolk is building near his own estate may 
be richer — but will either ever be so dear to such 
multitudes the world over? 

For "the Oratory" means Cardinal Newman 
and Father Faber, and they, by fame and soul- 
conquests, are not of the world of England and 
English blood, but of the wider world of English 
speech, and the widest world of Catholic Faith. 
Are there not some who regard the Oratorians as a 
peculiarly English association? Truly they have 
fitted the English need, as if they had been formed 
128 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

for naught else ; yet they were first instituted by St. 
Philip Neri in Rome over 300 years ago, and were 
long acclimated in France before they were dreamed 
of in England. They are priests living in com- 
munity, but not bound by the vows of religion. 

I have visited the church of the Oratorians, Sta. 
Maria in Vallicella, in Rome, and the chapel of 
St. Philip Neri, where his remains repose under the 
altar, with the usual circle of lighted lamps. Over 
the altar is a grand mosaic of St. Philip, vested for 
Mass, in prayer before Our Lady, from the original 
of Guido Reni, in the House of the Oratorians. 

The English Oratory suggests somewhat this 
famous Roman church. Of course it has not its 
wealth of sculptures and paintings, nor the statues 
by Algardi, Yasoldo, Flaminio Vacca, and Carlo 
Maratta ; nor the frescoes of Pietro Da Cortona, nor 
the paintings of Baroccio, Alberti, and Rubens ; nor 
the blessed body of the saint ; but, withal, his spirit 
is as vital in the London as in the Roman Oratory, 
and that is more than all the rest. 

Yet the Brompton Oratory has its own art treas- 
ures and wealth of marble altars. There is a beau- 
tiful chapel, St. Wilfrid's, a memorial to Father 
Faber, adorned with frescoes of the great saints of 
England. Besides the grand High Altar, set in a 
noble sanctuary, there are altars of the Mother of 
Sorrows, of St. Mary Magdalene, St. Joseph,Our Lady 
of Good Counsel, the Sacred Heart of Our Lord, and 
129 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

St. Patrick ; and before every one of them votive ta- 
pers are burning all day long, and at some are the votive 
hearts of silver, recalling the dear Italian shrines. 

Of the side altars in the Oratory, that which most 
impressed me was the first-mentioned, the Mother of 
Sorrows. The altar-piece is a very unusual picture 
of Our Lady. She stands with her hands dropped 
down, but slightly out-spread, and a face of desola- 
tion. There are no accessory figures. You imagine 
Calvary in the background, but you do not see it. 
You see only the bereaved human Mother of the 
Divine Son, saying in look and attitude : 

" All ye who pass by the way attend and see, if 
there be any sorrow like to my sorrow." 

There are tablets on each side of this shrine. On 
the left-hand one you read : 

Of your charity pray for the soul of Flora, 
Duchess of Norfolk, who put up this altar to the 
Mother of Sorrows, that they who mourn may 
here be comforted. She died April 11, 1887" 

On the right-hand tablet, this word from the 
Apocalypse : 

And God shall wipe all tears from their eyes. 

Many sore hearts have been comforted at this 
shrine which one afflicted mother raised for the sake 
of other sorrow-stricken mothers to the Mother 
of the Crucified. 

Cardinal Newman never preached in this church ; 
he was in it probably but twice — at its dedication, 
130 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

and, with Cardinal Manning, at the funeral of the 
Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Here, too, Cardinal 
Manning, unable to go to the Birmingham Oratory, 
at which Newman spent so many years, and where 
his funeral took place, preached a eulogy of the 
illustrious Oratorian. 

The original Oratory, the one which knew the 
voices of Newman and Faber, was on the site of 
Toole's Theatre, in a badly adapted casino, whose 
very inappropriate inscriptions sometimes struggled 
into sight, to the no slight annoyance of priests and 
people. 

The present Oratory, however, has inherited and 
increased the devout congregations of those early 
days. So many men, even at week-day services ! 
The various offices of the Church are conducted 
with the utmost order and beauty ; the preaching is 
good, and the music is ideal. Never have I heard a 
soprano like the one who sang the solos at the High 
Mass there on Sundays. But never until I heard 
her voice in the simpler music of the Litany of 
Loretto, which is sung in the Oratory at five o'clock 
Saturday evenings, before the Benediction of the 
Blessed Sacrament, could I understand the poetic 
expression of music " rilling out " from a songful 
throat. 

It is not the beauty of the ritual alone, nor of the 
preaching, nor of the music, nor of all three of these 
together, that bring these serious and earnest people 
131 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

so numerously and steadily. It is the Sacrament and 
the Sacrifice of the Altar. You feel that, and you 
pray for the reunion of Christendom. 

The house of the Oratorians is beside the church. 
A fine statue of Cardinal Newman stands in front 
of it. 

Across the street, is the most splendid Catholic 
bookstore I ever saw ; not only a fine assortment of 
the best Catholic publications — and how good even 
from the purely literary view-point these in England ! 
— but with a large-minded selection of the best secular 
literature. Such refined, beautiful prayer-books ! an 
evident demand for missals ; exquisite little pictures 
and objects of piety ; the gentlest and most intelligent 
attendance ! 

Verily, " the second spring " of England's Cath- 
olicity is a right forward season, largely through the 
number of men of social position, wealth and intel- 
lectual eminence who are proud and consistent con- 
fessors of the Old Faith before the modern world. 
Their example has marvellously helped their humbler 
fellow believers ; and it is safe to say that the influence 
of Catholics in England is great out of all proportion 
to their numbers. There are not more than a million 
and a half of them. 

The Duke of Norfolk, to be sure, is a tower of 

strength to them. Much as an American with Irish 

blood in his veins, must hate the Duke's Bourbon 

attitude to Irish Home Rule, one still must give him 

132 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

credit for a singularly pure and charitable life, and 
immense zeal for the progress of the Church. 

Not a few, however, of the leading English Cath- 
olics have become converts to the Irish cause, as Lord 
Ripon, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and Wilfrid Meynell ; 
and realize the debt which they owe for their own 
religious freedom and progress, to the ever faithful 
Catholics of Ireland. 

There are about 300,000 Catholics of Irish blood 
in London ; and their first church, St. Patrick's, is very 
interesting and devotional. A goodly number of the 
priests in active service in London are of Irish birth 
or blood. 

A notable proportion of the English priests are 
converts, who were former clergymen of the Church 
of England. It is estimated that there are about 
four hundred of such convert-priests in the whole 
of England. It would be interesting to know what 
is the proportion of priests from the English families 
who kept the Faith throughout the long centuries 
of persecution. 

The double movement in that country of the 
return of the Old Faith, and the development and 
assertion of Catholic ideas in the Church of England 
itself, has produced a curious effect on the minds of 
the ordinary people of the Anglican body. 

"Will you kindly direct me to the nearest 
Catholic church?" I asked one Saturday evening 
of a plump and civil-looking woman, who was doing 
. 133 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

a brisk business in buns and tarts in her neat little 
bake-shop. 

" What kind of Catholic, lydy ? There's two of 
'em near here. There's what some calls ' English 
Catholics,' and then there's the Catholic Catholics." 

I said I would have the latter, if she pleased ; 
and she directed me to St. Anselm's and St. 
Cecilia's, Lincoln's Inn Fields ; which you get at 
through a long lane and a court, and where you find 
priests of Irish names and marked English accent. 

There are fifty-six Catholic churches in London, 
to say nothing of convent and other private 
chapels. 

The pro-Cathedral in Kensington is not remark- 
able for beauty, though it is a very devotional 
church. One of the side-altars, the Altar of the 
Precious Blood, with its appealing picture of the 
thorn-crowned Christ, as Pilate showed Him to the 
people, remains clearest in my memory. 

Does it seem strange that in his long episcopate, 
and with his tremendous influence, Cardinal Man- 
ning should not have built, or, at least, begun a 
Cathedral worthy of his great Archdiocese ? Such 
a one was projected as early as 1865, and was to be 
a memorial of Cardinal Wiseman. 

Manning, then Archbishop-elect, was invited to 
preside at a meeting, held under the most dis- 
tinguished patronage, in the interest of this me- 
morial. He expressed his willingness to forward 
134 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

the work ; but first, he must build schools for the 
twenty thousand poor Catholic children in London, 
who were 4 running wild in the streets, without know- 
ledge of the Faith, a prey to apostasy or immorality.' 
Like a great American Catholic Bishop, Manning evi- 
dently believed that if schools are not built for the 
children of this generation, there will be little need 
for churches for the adults of the next. 

He housed his neglected children, with the aid of 
the Westminster Diocesan Educational Fund, which 
he established in 1866. His policy was to scatter over 
London small churches, with school-houses attached. 

While this was doing, he contented himself with 
St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, built 
under his direction. Here he constantly officiated 
and preached, drawing crowds of non-Catholics and 
making many converts. 

All he did for the new Cathedral was to purchase 
its site. Its building is the work of his successor, 
Cardinal Vaughan. 

But Manning saved the people and the children 
with his plain little churches and schools ; and what 
was the Temple of Jerusalem, what is St. Peter's, 
Rome, to the God of the Universe, beside the soul 
of some little ragamuffin in the slums of London or 
New York? 

* St. Mary's, Moorfields, the Pro-Cathedral in 

* Since the writer's visit, this church has been sold for over a million dol- 
lars, it being impossible to hold the place longer against the march of traffic ; 
and a church and schools are being provided on another site. 

135 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Cardinal Wiseman's day, had in its choir the in- 
scription in memory of him, written by his own hand, 
and his Cardinal's hat. It had also about the 
sanctuary walls a singularly vivid fresco of the 
Crucifixion of Our Lord, in which, if you con- 
templated it from a little distance, the figures stood 
out life-like. Here, in 1836, Dr. Wiseman gave 
those famous lectures on the doctrinal differences 
between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, 
which brought Manning (then an Anglican Arch- 
deacon) into the field against him, wroth especially 
at his " confounding the Church of England with 
other Protestant bodies;" and here Wiseman's 
obsequies were celebrated, the Catholic Manning 
(then Provost) preaching the eulogy. 

Remembering the restoration of the English 
hierarchy, and all the work of rebuiding done by 
Wiseman, there was marvellous fitness in the choice 
of text — a sufficient eulogy in itself — from Ec- 
clesiasticus : 

" Let Nehemias be a long time remembered, who 
raised up for us our walls that were cast down, and 
set up the gates and the bars, who rebuilt our 
houses." 

A singularly interestesting little Catholic church, 
dating from A. D. 1290, is St. Ethelreda's, in Ely 
Place. This church was the chapel of the London Pal- 
ace, which the Bishop of Ely built in the Thirteenth 
Century, against his coming up for his Parliamentary 
136 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

duties, and is all that is left of the original structure. 
It is a good specimen of the early decorated Gothic 
architecture. Within this church, after Henry VIII. , 
the work of stealing the Faith gradually from the 
simple people attending it, went on "cunningly," 
according to Cranmer's counsel — with the interlude 
and restorations of Mary Tudor's brief reign — till 
it became on the inside a typical Protestant house 
of worship under Queen Elizabeth. During her last 
years, and through the reign of James I., the Spanish 
Ambassador lived in Ely Palace, and St. Etheldreda's 
was restored to Catholic uses. Taken again for the 
established religion, under Charles I., it so remained 
until 1879, when the whole property was sold under 
an order of the Court of Chancery, and the Fathers 
of Charity bought it in through an agent. 

To an Irishman named Burke fell the delightful 
task of taking down the Royal Arms, hanging for so 
long over the Communion Table, which marked the 
place of the old time altar. 

I saw this interesting relic of heavy carved oak, in 
the Presbytery. Underneath is this inscription : 

" This emblem of the Royal Supremacy was 
removed from the Church of St. Etheldreda, when 
it was restored to the Roman obedience" 

The crypt of St. Etheldreda's is dedicated to St. 
Bridget of Ireland, in memory of the ancient dedi- 
cation of St. Bride's, Fleet Street, and of the little 
chapel of St. Bridget, Baldwin's Garden's (now 
137 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

obliterated by the growth of business), in one of the 
old Irish quarters of London. Masses are celebrated 
daily in the crypt, which is a favorite shrine of 
Catholic devotion. Its walls are ten feet thick. It 
is as dry as powder, as quiet as the grave ; as solemn 
as a look into the Life Beyond. 

In the church proper, above the crypt, we have St. 
Bridget again, in full length stained glass, companion- 
ing St. Etheldreda. The windows, especially the great 
Eastern window, with Christ as High Priest and 
King, His Blessed Mother and St. Joseph on either 
side, and angels above, are not surpassed by any in 
England. A grand new window, representing Blessed 
Thomas More, and his contemporary English mar- 
tyrs, adorns the vestibule. 

The bowl of the holy water font is one of the 
oldest relics of early Christianity in England. It is 
thought to have come down from an ancient British 
Church, and may have been in use before the mar- 
tyrdom of St. Alban, a.d. 303. 

St. Etheldreda (familiarly Audrey,) was a Saxon 
saint of royal blood, who resigned the crown for the 
veil of religion. St. Ethelburga (under whose in- 
vocation the Ritualists place their little chapel at 
Bishopsgate,) was her sister. The story of these 
royal sisters, whose queen mother, Hereswyda, 
was also a saint, is most marvellous and beauti- 
ful. How shall the restoration of St. Ethel- 
burga's, and St. Alban's, and the rest, be brought 
138 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

about? For they are praying, just as St. Etheldreda 
prayed. 

The Church of the Immaculate Conception, 
served by the Jesuit Fathers, commonly spoken of 
as " Farm St. Church," rivals the Oratory in the 
splendor of public worship, and the distinction of its 
parishioners. At this church is the venerable 
Father Galwey, who is credited with 10,000 direct 
conversions to the Faith. 

Lady Georgiana Fullerton, the cause of whose 
beatification is already talked of in England and in 
Rome, was a devout attendant at this church during 
the later years of her holy life. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XIV. 

Oxford and the Leading of the Kindly 
Light. 

" When I heard you say ' car ' instead of ' car- 
riage,' I knew you were an American." 

It was thus that one of my fellow-travellers broke 
the ice as we journeyed, one fine September morning, 
from London to Oxford. 

I hope I gave better proof of my nationality later. 
With my thoughts outstripping the express, and my 
eyes miraging the spires of the grand old University 
City, I would have been oblivious to Windsor Castle 
but for the ladies just referred to. 

" Oh, stand up and get a good look at Windsor ! 
If you were to go there some Sunday, you might see 
the Royal Family on the terrace." 

Alas ! these ladies who were so alert for the first 
glimpse of Windsor did not seem to know Oxford 
when it came in full sight ! 

Yet, to be quite fair, I must admit that this was 
almost the only instance winch I met of minute 
interest in royalty ; unless I count that of the good 
woman going by Westminster Abbey, who, in a 
strange mixture of cockney accent and Irish brogue, 
and to the evident interest of her less imaginative 
140 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

British companions, was making out an Irish 
pedigree for Queen Victoria ! 

But — to Oxford ! Is there anything anywhere 
more beautiful in its architecture and its background 
of natural scenery ? Is there anything to make the 
Catholic heart at once prouder and sadder ; aught 
more abounding in wild contradictions, more moving 
alternately t<* heart-sinking and to hope ? 

Oxford is one of the proudest memorials of 
Catholic Faith and piety ; the saddest conquest of 
Protestantism. It is the stronghold of Protestant- 
ism in England ; it is the cradle of that new move- 
ment within the Church of England itself* which is 
making the very word " Protestant " odious to a 
large and increasing number of Anglicans ; best of 
all, it has yielded an outpost in the Catholic recon- 
quest of England, for the Jesuits have now a col- 
lege at Oxford, and it is Campion House, in honor 
of the Blessed Edmund Campion, an Oxonian, a 
Jesuit, too, and a martyr of the Elizabethan perse- 
cutions. 

Perhaps the claim that Alfred the Great was 
practically the founder of Oxford University, as 
building a University Hall upon the place where 
University College now stands, is rather unsubstan- 
tial ; although a recent legal decision has sanctioned 
this tradition, and the assumed millenary of the 
foundation was celebrated in 1872. 

Still so great and already venerable was Oxford 
141 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

as a seat of learning in 1379, that William of 
Wykeman, Bishop of Winchester, called his munifi- 
cent foundation in that year, "New College." It 
was antedated by Hertford College, St. Edmund 
Hall, founded by St. Edmund Rich, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, Queen's College (called for Philippa, 
Queen of Edward III.), St. Mary's Hall, Oriel, 
Merton, Exeter, Worcester, and Balliol Colleges, 
and a number of the churches including Christ 
Church, the Cathedral of Oxford. 

From this last, we go back to Saxon times, and 
the Nunnery of St. Frideswide, which stood in 
740 a.d., the time of her death, on the present site 
of Christ Church. 

The part of the children of the Church in the 
Renaissance is attested by the numerous foundations 
of the fifteenth century and the early part of the 
sixteenth, at Oxford, as the Divinity School, the 
Bodleian Library, Magdalen College School, and St. 
Mary Magdalen, All Souls, Corpus Christi and Lincoln 
Colleges, and St. John's College, founded by Sir 
Thomas White in the short reign of Mary Tudor. 

The very names suggest the distinguishing features 
of Catholicity; for the college last-named was pri- 
marily in honor of the Blessed Sacrament ; while 
devotion to the Blessed Mother of God had its chief, 
though by no means its only monument in the col- 
legiate church dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin; 
and All Souls, founded in 1437, by Henry Chichele, 
142 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

one of the original Fellows of New College, and after- 
wards Archbishop of Canterbury, is styled in its 
charter " The College of All the Souls of the Faith- 
ful Departed, and especially the soids of Henry . V., 
King of England and France, and of the faithful 
subjects of the realm who fell in the French wars." 

As for St. Peter, he had two churches, St. Peter- 
le-Bailey and St. Peter-in-the-East, and the statues 
and pictures of SS. Peter and Paul, and represen- 
tations of Christ giving the Keys to Peter were as 
common as in Rome itself. 

The massive and picturesque ancient architecture 
stands out in its grand distinction amid all modern 
additions and restorations — the most wonderful and 
beautiful thing at Oxford ; the ancient names remain ; 
there are enough statues of the Blessed Virgin in 
high places to make you think of an Italian town ; 
indeed, there is something, perhaps those lovely old 
mediaeval towers, which reminds you of Grotta Ferrata. 

Time was, when the Vandals of the so-called 
Reformation had been busy enough within and with- 
out the churches and colleges materially to change 
the face of things ; statues of the Blessed Mother of 
God and the Saints were thrown down or mutilated ; 
altars removed, paintings and stained glass destroyed ; 
but the reverent, though not always artistically suc- 
cessful hand of the " restorer " has been busy for 
many years past ; and, on the exterior, at least, there 
is little to suggest Protestantism at Oxford. 
143 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

It was a memorable thing to visit Oxford at all ; 
but to see it under the guidance of a Jesuit was a 
doubly happy experience. It was my good fortune 
to have a letter of introduction to the Rev. Richard 
F. Clarke, S.J., the present head of Campion House, 
whom some of my readers may remember from his 
visit to the United States, in 1883, and whom all 
reading Catholics know from his writings. 

In the morning, a clever young scholastic did the 
honors for me ; in the afternoon, I had the privilege 
of seeing Father Clarke himself. 

It was with the former that I came on a reminder 
of the still dominant Protestantism, in the " Martyrs' 
Memorial," erected in commemoration of Cranmer, 
Ridley and Latimer. Dominant, one says, yet un- 
easy about its domination, and not causelessly. It 
was begun in 1841, in the beginnings of the Trac- 
tarian movement, and built against the constant pro- 
tests of the Tractarians ; being in itself a contradic- 
tion, as so many things Anglican are ; a protest 
against Catholicity, and a witness to the revival of 
Catholic ideas in the Church of England itself. 

After the easy ascent to the cupola of the 
Sheldonian Theatre, there was nothing more of the 
Cranmer memory or suggestion, in the views from 
any of the windows ; unless the suggestiveness of 
protest, or contrast, or reversion to the Old Order, 
as embodied respectively in the Wesley Memorial 
Church, Keble College, and the Church of St. 
144 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Aloysius. The views were all of unsupassed re- 
ligious and historic interest, the spires and towers 
rising up above the groves, now rich in the varied 
hues of early autumn. 

As we went down again, we viewed the Theatre 
itself from the undergraduates' gallery, and my 
companion was delightful in his enthusiastic descrip- 
tion of the scenes on Commemoration Day, the con- 
ferring of degrees, etc. 

But in the brief time at my disposal, I wanted 
chiefly to trace the footsteps of some of my heroes, 
as Cardinal Newman, Cardinal Manning, and Glad- 
stone. 

Balliol College, of which Manning was a Fellow, 
came first ; and we noted a fine portrait of him, 
taken in his later years, in the Dining Hall, in the 
oddly assorted company of John Wycliffe, Arch- 
bishop Tait, and Robert Browning, all Fellows of 
this college. 

Balliol dates back to the second half of the thir- 
teenth century, its founder being Sir John de Balliol, 
father of the Scotch King of that name. It is char- 
acteristic of that tenacious people, that Balliol is to 
the present day greatly affected by Scotch students. 

At Oxford among Manning's contemporaries were 
Newman and Gladstone. At the Union at Oxford, 
Manning scored his first oratorical triumph. Unlike 
Gladstone, who began as a defender of a benevolently 
managed slave system, Manning's first speech in 
145 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

favor of free trade, showed him already a champion 
of the people — the " Mosaic Radical" of the com- 
ing time. 

On another occasion he distinguished himself here 
in a debating contest with a delegation of Cambridge 
students consisting of Monckton Milnes, Henry Hal- 
lam, and Sunderland. These young men came as 
champions of the School of Shelly ; Manning cham- 
pioned Byron, and Gladstone testifies how ably. 
Still another characteristic speech of Manning's, as 
described by Thomas Mozley, was called forth by a 
motion to reduce the number of American news- 
papers taken at the Union. 

But time and space forbid my lingering on the 
reminiscences which the name of Manning evokes in 
connection with Oxford. 

Later in the day, I visited some of the scenes con- 
nected with Newman's life at Oxford, with Father 
Clarke. 

I should have said that term-time had not yet 
begun, and college-buildings, shady walks, and sunny 
quadrangles were alike deserted. 

We looked up from the quadrangle of Oriel to 
the windows of Newman's old rooms. If their walls 
could speak, what could they not tell us of him, 
and of two at least of the dearest friends of his 
young manhood, Robert Isaac Wilberforce and 
Richard Hurrell Froude. Wrote Newman, on 
September 7, 1829, "I am now in my rooms at 
146 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Oriel College, slowly advancing .... and 
led on by God's hand blindly, not knowing whither 
He is taking me." These rooms were his home till 
his appointment to Littlemore, in 1841. 

We visited the Church of St. Mary, the Virgin, 
of which Newman became vicar in 1828. It dates 
from the thirteenth century, and abounds in religious 
and historic interest. Here is the tomb of Adam le 
Brom, founder of Oriel. Here Blessed Edmund 
Campion preached the funeral sermon of Amy 
Robsart. Here, in 1833, Keble began the Trac- 
tarian movement with his sermon on England's 
Apostasy. Here was Newman's voice heard in his 
young manhood. 

This church is not Ritualistic, nor even very 
" High," for all of the sculptured Virgin Mother 
with her Divine Child above the portico. On the 
altar covering I read: "Magnificat anima mea 
Dominium." 

" Not here now," I thought ; " but surely by-and- 

by-" 

Matthew Arnold and " Tom " Hughes were Fel- 
lows of Oriel, and Pusey and Keble at an earlier 
day. But Keble, founder of the Tractarian Move- 
ment, Keble of " Christian Year " fame, was also a 
Fellow of Corpus Christi College. How Keble im- 
pressed Newman may be gathered from a letter of 
his to John William Bowden, the great friend of 
his undergraduate year, describing his election to a 
147 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Fellowship at Oriel : " I had to hasten to the Tower 
to receive the congratulations of all the Fellows. I 
bore it till Keble took my hand, and then felt so 
abashed and unworthy of the honor done to me that 
I seemed desirous of quite sinking into the ground. " 
Newman cut himself away from Oxford and all its 
cherished associations in 1845, on his reception into 
the Catholic Church; but he appreciated most 
deeply its honors to him in his declining years, and 
Oxford today in her pride in the spiritual and in- 
tellectual achievement and the spotless life of this 
great son, adds the best love and reverence in her 
gift to those which he won after he had gone out 
from her at the leading of the Kindly Light. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



XV. 

The Rector of Campion House. 

The great quadrangle of Christ Church was full 
of the mellow September sunshine, and the American 
woodbine was reddening on the massive gray stone 
walls. Christ Church, as my readers know, is at 
once the Cathedral of the (Anglican) Diocese of 
Oxford, and the church of the college of the same 
name, and the sole instance of such a union. 

It has a long and eventful history, beginning before 
the middle of the eighth century, as the Church of 
St. Frideswide's nunnery ; then, on a more splendid 
scale, the Church of the Benedictine Priory of St. 
Frideswide, then in the hands of Cardinal Wolsey, 
during his brief enjoyment of the favor of Henry 
VIIL, and, finally, with the dignity of Cathedral 
added to all its other distinctions, when this King, as 
head of the then Schismatical Church of England, 
created, in 1546, the Diocese of Oxford. 

We entered the church through the double arch- 
way in the great quadrangle, and one of us, at least, 
felt the soft light gratefully on eyes that had been 
wearied, but not satisfied, with seeing. We were in 
a church of ancient Catholic days, for these venerable 
columns and arches were witnesses to Holy Mass and 
monks in choir more than seven hundred years ago, 
149 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

when all Christendom was shuddering at the murder 
of the courageous Primate of England, Thomas a 
Becket, on the altar-steps of his Cathedral of Can- 
terbury. 

There is a Becket window in St. Lucy's chapel, in 
which the head of the Martyr lias been obliterated — 
by order of the king who profaned his shrine and 
cast his ashes into the Thames. Restorations have 
been made very extensively in the interior of the 
church proper, and the various chapels, so that the 
old-time worshippers, could they now come back, 
would not feel so strange as they might have felt a 
hundred years ago ; but no one has dared to touch 
the Becket window. It is better so — as yet ; for it 
teaches when and how the royal supremacy in religion 
began, and England has not yet mastered the lesson. 

Christ Church is much more " advanced " than the 
Church of St. Mary the Virgin, as altars and win- 
dows and statuary show. Here Dr. Edward Bouverie 
Pusey, the leader in the Oxford movement, was for 
fifty years a canon in residence ; and under a marble 
slab, in the Lady chapel, with a Latin inscription that 
might have been written for any Catholic tomb, his re- 
mains rest with those of his wife and two daughters. 
His only son is buried in the little enclosure just be- 
yond the south transept of the church, and the adjoin- 
ing Chapter House. I read the Requiescat prayer- 
fully, as one must, remembering Cardinal Newman's 
testimony to Pusey' s sincerity. 
150 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Father Clarke showed me the brass in the floor 
which marks the resting-place of St. Frideswide, and 
the Burne-Jones windows, depicting scenes in her 
life, the triumph of St. Michael the Archangel, St. 
Cecilia, St. Katharine of Alexandria. 

England was great in church architecture in its 
Catholic days, but except in its glorious stained glass, 
sacred art was of slow growth ; and, as in Westmin- 
ster Abbey, Oxford, etc., it had to call the Italian 
artists to its aid. Whatever chance it had of a 
native school of sacred art was killed by the so-called 
Reformation. It was only three hundred years later, 
and among those whose hearts were turning kindly to 
the faith, the practices, the art and the poetry of the 
Old Church, that we can trace the beginnings of a 
native art marked by any degree of beauty, dignity 
and spirituality. Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel 
Rosetti, alike in art and poetry are its first masters ; 
and even if there is a fantastical streak, and a queer 
suggestion of the " Posters " of a later day, as there 
certainly is in the windows of St. Frideswide, there 
is far more heavenly-mindedness about them than 
about Sir Joshua Reynolds "Angels," for example. 

There are ancient tombs near St. Frideswide's ; as 
of the devout lady who built the Latin chapel, a prior, 
and a companion-in-arms of the Black Prince ; their 
occupants, uneasily we can well believe, neighboring 
the dust of Protestant deans and canons. 

There is carved wood work of Wolsey's day here, 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

and in the east wall of the Chapter House the foun- 
dation-stone of Wolsey's College at Ipswich. 

When the old Priory came into Wolsey's hands in 
1522, Sir Thomas More and Erasmus were the rec- 
ognized and most eloquent Catholic exponents of the 
" new learning." Wolsey would be like them, but on 
a grander scale, and would found a college where the 
aforesaid " new learning " would be splendidly culti- 
vated for the service of the Church. Indeed the first 
stone of this college was laid on July 16, 1525, and, 
there is a characteristic touch in its projected title of 
" Cardinal's College." 

Alas ! in less than four years, poor Wolsey was in 
deep disfavor with the King, and the world knew 
nothing more of " Cardinal's College." As Shake- 
speare makes his retrospect : — 

— " I have ventured 
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders 
This many summers on a sea of glory, 
But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride 
At length broke under me, and now hath left me, 
Weary and old with service, to the mercy 
Of the rude stream that must forever hide me. 
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye ! " 

We have named Cardinal Wolsey ; another chan- 
cellor of England, Sir Thomas More, subsequently 
martyred, under Henry VIII., now invoked by 
Catholics, as Blessed Thomas More ; and his friend, 
Erasmus, who, into however unsafe paths straying, 
never left the Old Church. Their full-length por- 
152 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

traits are in the stained-glass windows in the great 
mediaeval dining hall of Christ Church ; and among 
other distinguished Fellows of this college, honored 
in the same way, are Burton of the "Anatomy of 
Melancholy Fame," and Locke, who wrote on " The 
Human Understanding. ' ' 

Holbein's oil portrait of Wolsey is there also, and 
Henry VIII., with his fat cheeks and his cruel little 
mouth, from the same master's hand, in the place of 
honor. 

Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary and 
friend, was a Fellow of Christ Church ; so was the 
chivalrous Sir Philip Sidney. 

A marvellous array of English statesmen, many 
of whom attained the rank of Prime Minister, 
like Peel and Canning ; and strangely enough, three 
successive Prime Ministers of England's latest years, 
Gladstone, Salisbury, and Rosebery, were Fellows of 
this college. 

Gladstone's portrait is one of the finest in the 
collection. 

Gladstone's record at Oxford was one of the most 
hard-working, exemplary, and devout among the 
students. 

Like his friend Manning, he made an early 
oratorical fame in the Oxford Union ; and the future 
Prime Minister was succeeded in its presidency by 
the future Cardinal. 

I have mentioned Dr. Pusey as the leader of the 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Oxford movement. Earlier than he were John and 
Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, which 
represented a reaction of another sort against the 
dry-rot of the State Church, and indirectly helped to 
the Oxford movement itself. So it can be easily 
seen what a part Christ Church has filled in the 
political and religious life of England. 

But the day was waning, and there was little 
more time for what I had planned to see in my first 
visit to Oxford. 

Presently we came out on a full view of Magdalen 
Tower with the westering sun upon it. What is 
there anywhere of lovelier symmetry than this ? 

"In old Catholic days," said Father Clarke, 
u Mass was said on top of the tower every May 
Day. A vestige of the old devotion survives in the 
hymn to the Holy Trinity, now chanted by the choir 
at five o'clock May Day morning." 

Over the great gateway of Magdalen College are 
statues of St. Mary Magdalen and St. John the 
Evangelist, together now in memory of their associ- 
ation at the Cross on Good Friday. 

The St. Magdalen Chapel was completed in 1480, 
twenty-two years after the founding of the college by 
Bishop William Patten, of Waynflete, and contains 
the tomb of the Bishop's father. Restorations have 
been numerous. The old sexton came in with us, 
and calling our attention to the host of statues of 
saints of the Old Law and the New in the canopied 
154 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

niches of the reredos, recited the story of the de- 
struction of their prototypes by Cromwell. 

"This is Habraham," he said, indicating the 
venerable and majestic figure of the Father of the 
Faithful, but the rest of the saints of three thousand 
years had to be taken for granted ; and the old sex- 
ton gratefully saved his breath and pocketed his 
shilling. 

The altar piece is " Christ Bearing His Cross," by 
Ribalta, and one of the great windows has a Last 
Judgment by Christopher Schwartz. 

Among the canonized saints who were students at 
Oxford, was the Carmelite, St. Simon Stock, who 
later became General of his Order, and to whom 
Our Blessed Lady revealed the devotion of the 
Scapular. 

We visited the Deer Park, and saw those lovely 
creatures of the forest, apparently un vexed by ances- 
tral memories, coming up to eat a bit from friendly 
hands, their big, beautiful eyes uplifted fearlessly. 

We paced "Addison's Walk" — the poet was a 
Fellow of Magdalen ; but walked longer under the 
elms of the "Broad Walk," and finally down to the 
barges, in this dull time moored close to the banks 
of the Isis, scene of the boat races in which the 
University youth of two continents have such 
interest. 

In one of these barges we found many pictures of 
famous rowers of past times. One of them was a 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

young man with large, dark eyes and brown side- 
whiskers. Despite the difference of costume and 
years, I saw the resemblance. 

" That was you," I said to Father Clarke. 

He smiled faintly. " Yes," he admitted ; and then 
my feminine curiosity wanted more. 

" I am a Fellow of St. John's College," he said, 
"I became a parson — " 

" No, I was not especially ' advanced,' " in response 
to my visible, but unspoken question. 

" When I became a Catholic I was free to give 
myself to the service of the Church, which I did in 
the Society." 

" Isn't it a grand thing to be here again, in the 
scenes of your youth, as a priest, a Jesuit ? " 

His grave, dark face lighted up, and he said 
solemnly : 

" I thank God for it, as for the exceeding great 
reward of any earthly sacrifice in my life." 

Father Clarke is a tall, strong-looking man, de- 
liberate of speech, with a look of great reserve 
power, repressed eagerness, and intensity of feeling. 

I well remember the impression he made speaking 
from the pulpit of the Church of the Immaculate 
Conception, in Boston, fifteen years before. You 
saw the thought in his eyes before his lips uttered 
it. He took Protestantism very seriously, I thought. 
In the great American cities, even then, Unitarian- 
ism and an artistic eclecticism in religion, seemed so 
156 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

much more ominous than the divided forces of Evan- 
gelical Protestantism, that it was rather startling to 
hear a reference to Luther. 

Father Clarke is a man of fine literary culture, 
and the author of a great number of books on relig;- 
ious, sociological and literary topics. 

One of these, " My Visit to Distressed Ireland," 
written after a sojourn in that country during the 
famine of 1881, reveals him as a strong sympathizer 
with the plain people, and a friend of Irish Home 
Rule. 

Father Clarke edited the London Month for 
years, and is still a frequent contributor to the 
Nineteenth Century and other high class secular 
publications. At the times of my second visit to 
London and my first to Dublin, Mrs. Humphrey 
Ward's " Helbeck of Bannisdale," was a prominent 
subject of discussion in literary and religious circles ; 
and none of the many articles which it inspired had 
won more attention than Father Clarke's in the 
Nineteenth Century. 

I found but little change in his appearance, for so 
long an interval as fifteen years. The jet-black hair 
had become mixed with grey ; but the eyes were as 
full of fire, there was the unchanged evidence of 
nervous strength, and force restrained. A notable 
personality to begin the succession of the presidents 
of Campion College. 

Blessed Edmund Campion, for whom it is called, 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

was a fellow of St. John's College, and a protege* of 
Sir Thomas White, its founder, Lord Mayor of 
London in the time of Mary Tudor. It was a bad 
beginning for the future martyr that, dazzled by the 
favor of Queen Elizabeth, and the magnates of her 
court, he chose the new religion, and actually took 
deacon's orders in the Anglican body. But hardly 
had he made this false step than he almost died of 
remorse for it — renounced the world, and became 
as it is justly claimed the leader of the first Oxford 
movement, inasmuch as he drew many other brilliant 
men with him back to Rome. His terrible martyr- 
dom took place in 1581. There was a price on a 
Jesuit's head, in England, in those days, and for 
many years after. 

Who in his wildest dreams then could have 
thought that Jesuits would ever again walk the 
streets of London as free men, much less set up 
their churches and colleges in the open, or be en- 
trusted with a Government scientific commission, as 
was the Jesuit astronomer, Father Perry — least of 
all, be permitted a college at Oxford, with the 
martyred Campion's name? 

But my brief day was done. After grateful 
farewell to Father Clarke, I took a hasty drive 
about the old city, the better to impress its extent 
and exterior beauty upon the eyes that had been 
able to see so little in detail ; got a glimpse of the 
interior of the Jesuits' Church, St. Aloysius, of the 

158 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Ritualist churches, St. Bartholomew and St. Barna- 
bas — the latter with confessionals in the corners and 
the purple stoles of the clergymen, hanging over 
them ; saw the exterior of churches like St. Ebbe's, 
of immemorial Catholic foundation ; the houses of 
Catholic nuns, and Anglican Sisterhoods, and no end 
of curious old civic monuments — enough to make 
me long for many weeks of quiet leisure, to steep 
myself in the atmosphere of the place ; and carry 
away much more than the memory of sunset on 
towers, and spires, and crosses and statues ; and 
visions of mediaeval saints with praying hands up- 
lifted for the dawning of a holier day on England. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XVI. 
English "Continuity" in Rome. 

A young Anglican clergyman, a curate of St. 
Mary-the- Virgin's, Oxford, was one of the dwellers 
under the same tent with me for three weeks in 
Rome. He had come earlier than I ; and for the 
express purpose of studying in the Vatican Library. 
I think he never lost from it a moment of the four 
hours — from nine in the morning till one in the 
afternoon — during which it is open to students. All 
his regret was, that it was not eight hours instead of 
four. 

He often went out in the afternoon to the Basilian 
Monastery of Grotta Ferrata, near Villa Frascati, 
then the summer home of the students of the 
American College, to consult the library there. He 
was eloquent on the kindness of these monks, who 
belong to the United Greek rite, and who not only 
gave him access to their valuable books and MSS., 
but the cordial hospitality of the monastery, whenever 
he chose to avail himself of it. 

This curate looked much younger even than his 
twenty-seven years. Indeed, he was distinctly boyish. 
A young athlete, in an unclerical grey tweed suit, 
tall, with a fair, open face, good, clear eyes that met 
yours with a child's direct and confident gaze, a bush 
160 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

of light-brown hair, and a sincere voice, as little 
self-conscious as an oak tree or a locomotive. You 
had to like him and to trust him, too. 

To be sure, he had the English race pride in its 
fidness, and was rather sorry for the people whom it 
had pleased Providence to handicap in the struggle 
of life by permitting them to be born in other coun- 
tries — somewhat in the spirit of the kindly women 
in Bleeding-Heart Yard, in " Little Dorrit," towards 
the Italian sojourner among them. 

It took him some time, too, to grasp the well- 
within-bounds statements of the Bostonian as to the 
numerical strength and influence of the Keltic 
element in America — and the importance of its 
attitude on the subject of an Anglo-American alli- 
ance. I really wasn't satisfied with his grasp of the 
purely American idea on anything, at any time ! He 
believed implicity in his own country's present and 
future, and was disposed to accept without much 
question the thoughtless assertions of other English- 
men as to the decadence of Southern races. 

Yet, in Rome, you can hardly pick your steps in 
the streets, for the straight-limbed, active babies, so 
beautiful, many of them, that you might easily dupli- 
cate among them the cherub-faces in the glory of 
angels about Sassoferata's Madonna in the Vatican 
Gallery. Oh, no ! this Italian blood that ran in the 
veins of the world's great priests and soldiers, of her 
poets, and painters, and sculptors, and architects, and 
161 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

engineers, and physicians, and singers, and dramatists, 
is not decadent, but 

"hath earnest in it of far springs to be," 

as they know, who have broad outlook, and realize 
its new birth in America, Australia, and England 
itself; and its renewing power in the place of its 
beginning. 

But the young Oxford curate had an open mind, 
and the Vatican Library, and the kindly Greek 
monks, and his cosmopolitan environment, were not 
lost on him. He enjoyed his daily friendly tiffs with 
the Bostonian, chummed with the Australian-Irish 
Dean, who was his vis-a-vis at table ; was comradely 
with the Roman citizen ; joined the little Catholic 
party who went out to see and hear the illuminations 
and Our Lady's serenade on the evening of the feast 
of her Thrice-Blessed Motherhood; and took us 
afterward to the Piazza Colonna for coffee, which we 
drank at one of the little tables in front of the 
restaurant, with a glance now and then at St. Paul, 
clear outlined by the electric light, on his lofty 
station on top of the column of Marcus Aurelius. 

Religiously, this curate of St. Mary-the- Virgin's 
was not at all " advanced." Ritual was not of great 
moment to him, and he was not remarkably impres- 
sionable to the magnificence of the Roman Basilicas. 
His mind was singularly devoid of prejudice and 
antagonism. He seemed in his researches to be 

162 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

going to the very roots of things ; and while there 
was no evidence at all of a present turning Rome- 
ward, we could not but think what a conquest this 
straightforward, cheerful soul would be ; and wonder 
if he might not be an object of interest to a certain 
illustrious rector of St. Mary-the- Virgin's, who had 
looked on this same Rome with his Protestant eyes, 
more than half a century before, and returned to 
enter her communion in his native land. 

Hardly had the Oxford curate left us — greatly 
missing his sunny presence — than he was succeeded 
by another Anglican of different type. This was the 
rector of a parish in the Orkneys — a slender, pale, 
ascetic young man ; unquestionably priestly-looking 
and devout, with the Sign of the Cross and the in- 
vocations of Our Lady and the Saints, as natural as 
you please ; satisfied thus far, with his position, but 
prayerful for the reunion of Christendom. 

You know, dear readers, that in Scotland the 
Church of England is not the State Church ; and 
there, significantly enough its bishops and clergy are 
mostly Ritualists. 

In the month of my visit to Rome, October, the 
weather was warm but delightful ; the day broken 
sometimes by a couple of smart thunder-showers ; or 
possibly, in the evening, a little rain and hail-storm 
pattering on the glass-roof of our lofty and cheerful 
reading room, clearing up so that we could look out 
at moon or starlight before retiring ; but never a 
163 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

long rainy day such as Boston knows so well at all 
seasons. 

Still the kindly Romans knowing the brevity of 
some of the visitors' sojourns, used to apologize to us 
for the weather ! 

" Oh," said the rector from the Orkneys, " with 
us, it rains on Sunday, it sleets on Monday, it snows 
on Tuesday, it rains and blows on Wednesday, it 
snows and rains on Thursday, it rains and hails on 
Friday, and sleets and rains on Saturday. Would 
you apologize for such weather of Paradise as you 
have here now?" 

I could imagine him in his little church above the 
rocks and friths, awaiting the congregation Coming 
through the sleet and rain to a worship that looked 
like that which St. Columba taught the sturdy Scots 
thirteen centuries ago ; or travelling among his 
widely-scattered flock on sick-visiting. For, indeed, 
the priestly ideal was in his heart. 

Yet the Australian Dean did not get on with him 
as with the young Oxford curate ; nor did the little 
lady who had to have her afternoon tea, though she 
must go a mile for it ; nor even the Roman citizen, who 
looked like George Parsons Lathrop ; so he and the 
Bostonian were fain to make friends, and dow and then 
have early coffee and rolls and a long chat together. 

" Isn't it rather sad for me here, withal," he said 

one Sunday morning. " I have to trudge up the hill 

to the English church to receive Communion at the 

164 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

half -past eight celebration, and then come down to 
fulfil my obligation of hearing Mass over at the 
Minerva, or some other of your churches." 

" When you come to Rome again," I ventured, " I 
hope you'll be able to have Mass and Holy Commun- 
ion in the same church." 

He looked up quickly — 

" I understand you. It does not seem so to me 
now, but if ever I should see that my duty to God 
lay that way, I should go through fire to do it." 

He was greatly pleased to have an interview with 
an Archbishop of the United Greek rite, who was in 
Rome at the time with the Greek Patriarch ; and was 
most solicitous for an audience with the Holy Father. 
To this privilege he hoped to be helped by an old 
friend who had recently entered the Church and been 
ordained to the priesthood, the Rev. Basil Maturin, 
who was expected a little later at the English College. 

Awaiting him, he went for a brief trip to Naples, 
and before his return the Bostonian had taken her 
reluctant way northward, so we met no more. 

Perhaps if I had not first noted the monuments 
of ancient Catholic days in London and Oxford, the 
growth of Ritualism and the " second spring" of the 
Old Church herself in England, or held free daily 
converse with typical Anglican churchmen in the 
Roman environment, I might not have become so 
interested in the Roman testimony to England's old- 
time close union with the See of Peter. 
165 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

" Continuity" is a sort of catchword of the English 
High Church people. But Rome is the place wherein 
to study this " continuity " aright. 

The Roman (adopted) citizen * to whom I have 
so often referred in these papers, is an authority on 
Rome in England, and, still more, on England in 
Rome. In his company I had the pleasure of tracing 
that golden line of "continuity" from the days of 
Pope St. Gregory and St. Augustine of Canter- 
bury until now. 

Of course, it is true that Christianity had a still 
earlier beginning in the land that is now England. 
Pope St. Eleutherius, at the instance of King Lucius, 
of the Britons, sent missionaries to England, in the 
second half of the second century. St. Gregory and 
St. Augustine knew of these ancient Christians, whose 
descendants by that time had been driven by their 
Saxon conquerors into the mountain regions of 
Wales, and the latter was prompt in seeking them 
out after his landing in Kent. But so great was 
their antipathy to their conquerors and oppressors 
that they were not willing to help Augustine in his 
missionary work among them, and even refused con- 
formity in certain matters, as to the time for cele- 
brating Easter, etc., which had become part of the 
discipline of the Church Universal ; largely because 
these had been accepted by the hereditary enemies 
of their nationality. 

* William J. D. Croke, LL. D. 
166 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Whereupon St. Augustine prophesied that "If 
they would not preach to the English the way of life, 
they would fall by their hands under the judgment 
of death." This prediction was fulfilled years after 
the death of St. Augustine, when Ethilfrid, King of 
the pagan Northern English, mightily overthrew the 
Britons at Chester, and massacred twenty-two hundred 
of the British monks at Bangor, who were praying 
in sight of the battlefield for victory to their country- 
men. 

One cannot refrain from drawing a contrast 
between these Britons and the Irish of a later day. 
Whatever the national antagonism of the Irish to the 
English, who have oppressed, but never conquered 
them, the former have not only never refused, but 
have been always ready to do spiritual good to the 
latter. 

Since England's break from the centre of unity, 
Irish priests have helped to keep the Faith alive in 
England. To an Irish statesman, the great O'Con- 
nell, English as well as Irish Catholics owe their 
Emancipation. To an Irish priest, the Very Rev. 
Dr. Russell, uncle of the present (Irish) Lord Chief 
Justice of England, the Church in England owes 
Cardinal Newman. 

It was Cardinal Manning's knowledge of the 
fidelity of the multitudes of Irish in England to the 
Faith, under hard circumstances, of the generous zeal 
of the Irish priests in England and its colonies, 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

which, with his keen sense of justice and sympathy 
with the people, made him a Home Ruler in his 
later years. 

But this is digressing from the early plantings of 
the Faith in England. 

A pious legend tells us that England's first Apostle 
was Joseph of Arimathea ; that he came thither 
from Palestine with his son and eleven other dis- 
ciples, at the instance of St. Philip, one of the 
twelve Apostles, in the fifteenth year after the 
Assumption of the Mother of God. King Arviragus 
gave them an island called Avalon, and hereon they 
built a church of wooden wands — the first religious 
edifice, on the site of the afterwards famous Abbey 
of Glastonbury. 

Joseph of Arimathea brought with him the Holy 
Grail — now, by the way, preserved in the Cathedral 
Church of Genoa. 

Tennyson takes up those devout legends in one of 
the Idyls of the King, " The Holy Grail." 

Sir Percivale, who became a monk in the Abbey 
of Camelot, after the Quest of the Grail, tells the 
story to his fellow-monk, Ambrosius : 

"Nay, Monk ! what phantom ? " answered Percivale, 
' ' The cup, the cup itself, from which Our Lord 
Drank at the Last sad Supper with His own. 
This, from the blessed land of Aromat — 
After the day of darkness, when the dead 
"Went wandering o'er Moriah — the good Saint, 
Arimathean Joseph, journeying brought 
168 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn 
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of Our Lord. 
And there awhile it bode ; and if a man 
Could touch or see it, he was healed at once, 
By faith of all his ills. But then the times 
Grew to such evil that the holy cup 
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappeared. " 

To whom the Monk : ' ' From our old books I know 
That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury, 
And there the heathen prince, Arviragus, 
Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build ; 
And there he built with wattles from the marsh 
A little lonely church in days of yore." 

On the strength of this legend, the Kings of Eng- 
land claimed precedence of the Kings of France in 
certain ancient church councils, asserting that St. 
Denis, the first Apostle of France, came thither 
some decades after the advent of Joseph of Arima- 
thea to England, and that therefore they — the Eng- 
lish Kings, did " far transcend all other Kings in 
worth and honor, so much as Christians are more 
excellent than Pagans." 

But here we are, at the foot of the Ccelian Hill, 
and parting company with these beautiful old legends 
— " so old they may well be true " — are about to 
come among the memorials of Pope St. Gregory, the 
Great, to whom England and all Europe owe so 
much of their Christianity and civilization. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XVII. 

Rome's English Memorials of Thirteen 
Centuries. 

A Roman citizen, the son of a Roman Senator, a 
practising lawyer, a praetor or Chief Governor of 
Rome for twelve years, then a Benedictine monk, an 
abbot, and finally Pope — Gregory I., had certainly 
an extraordinary preparation for the great career 
foreshown in vision to his mother Sylvia, as she held 
him, a baby, in her arms. 

The pictures and statues of St. Gregory are prob- 
ably quite faithful, as there were contemporary por- 
traits of himself, his father and mother, which he 
presented to the Monastery of St. Andrew, wherein 
he abode in peace for so many laborious years, and 
of whose holy seclusion he thought so often and 
regretfully during the strenuous years of his Pontifi- 
cate. It is the face of an aristocrat and a ruler, 
virile, stern almost, but modified with evidence of 
human tenderness about the lips, and in the lofty 
brow and eyes a heavenly compassion that came 
down from the Holy Spirit, " the Father of the Poor," 
whose symbolic dove ever attends St. Gregory. 

He kept his choir-boys in order with a strap — it 
is still to be seen ; but he treasured the silver cup 
of his own childhood, the gift of his beloved mother, 
170 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

after he had parted with all his other possessions to 
the poor ; and the outgoing of his heart to the young 
English captives in the Roman slave-market, has 
long been the theme of song and story. 

The home of his youth and early manhood was on 
the Ccelian Hill, where his church now stands. 

The memory of two noble Roman martyrs, of the 
days of Julian the Apostate, the soldier-brothers, 
John and Paul, must have been very fresh in his 
mind ; for their church, built by Pammachus, on 
the site of their residence, and the scene of their 
martyrdom, was comparatively new in his day, and 
but a few moments' walk from his house ; and the 
near-by St. John Lateran, as the Basilica stood from 
the reign of Constantine, had a prominent part in 
his devout life, alike as layman and monk. 

On his father's death, he made the grand old 
home into a church and monastery. His widowed 
mother — now honored in the Church as St. Sylvia — 
had, of course, her share of the estate, and lived in a 
suitable house opposite to the Church of San Gio- 
vanni e Paolo. The house is in ruins, but the 
garden about it, wherein, no doubt, Gregory played 
in his childhood, and gazed across with thoughtful 
eyes to the Palace of the Caesars — not then in ruins 
— is still cared for and shown. 

Gregory is one of those extraordinary men whose 
persistent vitality will haunt the scenes of their 
earthly pilgrimage till the Day of Doom. After 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

thirteen centuries, he still lives, and in a measure, 
rules in Rome. Go where you will, you find him in 
one or other phase of his many-sided personality. 

Here we have to do with him only in his relation 
to the conversion of England. This church, outside 
of which we have lingered so long, was called by him 
St. Andrew's. A later Gregory gave to it its present 
title. Kneeling on the ground at the foot of these 
broad stone steps, St. Augustine and his companion 
missionaries to England — the Pope's compassion for 
these fair young Anglican captives was fruitful — 
received the last blessing of Gregory who stood in 
the gateway at the top of the flight. This was A. D. 
597. History this. No mist of legend or unverified 
tradition about this great golden link then to attach 
England to the centre of Christian unity. The 
Roman Empire was falling into decadence, and 
Augustine and his fellow-Benedictines were bringing 
to a little island in the Northern Seas, not only 
Christianity, but the seeds of that industrial and 
intellectual development from which the modern 
successor of old Roman Imperialism was to grow. 

On either side of Cardinal Scipio Borghese's 
splendid portico, are inscriptions, the one setting 
forth in brief, the history of the church and monas- 
tery ; the other giving the names of the famous men 
whom the latter produced. Among them we find, 
after St. Gregory himself, such suggestive names as 
St. Augustine, Apostle of England ; St. Laurentius, 
172 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Archbishop of Canterbury ; St. Mellitus, Bishop of 
London and Archbishop of Canterbury ; St. Justus, 
Bishop of Rochester ; St. Paulinus, Bishop of York. 
Some goodly bits of the Rock of Peter these, to set 
into the foundations of the ancient English Church ! 

Within the church we saw Cordieri's great statue 
of St. Gregory (in St. Barbara's chapel), and frescoes 
by Viviani, and pictures by Badalocchi, commemorat- 
ing events in the Saint's crowded life, as the supper 
of St. Gregory, the miracle of the Brandeum (or 
Bleeding Host) ; the winning of the soul of the 
Emperor Trajan, etc., etc. 

Still more interesting to us was the monastic cell 
of St. Gregory, with his marble chair, and the elo- 
quent Latin inscription on the place where his hard 
bed lay. 

The original of Caracci's picture of St. Gregory is 
in England, but a good copy is in this church in the 
chapel of the Salviati family, with the saint's miracu- 
lous Madonna. 

A chapel to St. Andrew, with the famous frescoes 
of the saint before his cross and undergoing his 
scourging, respectively by Guido and Domenichino — 
recalls the earlier dedication of the church. Nor 
has the cherished mother of St. Gregory been for- 
gotten. There is St. Sylvia's Chapel, and her splendid 
statue, also by Cordieri, while the fresco of the Lord 
attended by angels is from the hand of Guido. 

St. Gregory as Pope was the friend of the 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

oppressed Jews, the opponent of all coercion of con- 
science, the ransomer of slaves, for whom he gave the 
sacred vessels of the altars to be melted and made 
into coin. With St. John of Matha, St. Anselm, St. 
Ambrose, St. Patrick, and other of the Church's holy 
" men of old," he had a warm place in the heart of 
the Quaker poet, Whittier. In one of his sweetest 
poems, " St. Gregory's Guest," he has enshrined two 
beautiful stories which connect the memory of the 
saint and his mother Sylvia: 

One day before the monk's door came 

A beggar stretching empty palms, 
Fainting and fast-sick, in the name 

Of the Most Holy asking alms. 

And the monk answered, " All I have 

In this poor cell of mine I give, 
The silver cup my mother gave ; 

In Christ's name take thou it, and live." 

Years passed ; and called at last to bear 

Pastoral crook and keys of Rome, 
The poor monk, in Saint Peter's chair, 

Sat the crowned Lord of Christendom. 

" Prepare a feast," St. Gregory cried, 
" And let twelve beggars sit thereat." 

The beggars came, and one beside, 
An unknown stranger with them sat. 



A grave, calm face the stranger raised, 
Like His who on Gennesaret trod, 

Or His on whom the Chaldeans gazed, 
Whose form was as the Son of God. 
174 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

" Know'st thou," He said, "thy gift of old? " 

And in the hand He lifted up 
The Pontiff marvelled to behold 

Once more his mother's silver cup. 

" Thy prayers and alms have risen and bloom 
Sweetly among the flowers of heaven, 

I am the Wonderful through whom 
Whatever thou askest shall be given. " 

There are tombs of English exiles under St. 
Gregory's roof, and much else worth lingering on, 
if one's sojourn in Rome were to be counted by 
months instead of weeks. 

St. Gregory's Church figures again in English 
politico-religious history, but the time is nearly nine 
centuries ahead. Let us leave it for the present, 
and come to the Borgo in the Leonine City, hard by 
St. Peter's own Basilica. 

Fifty years after the landing of St. Augustine in 
Kent, and the founding of the Prhnatial See of 
Canterbury, pilgrims began to make their way from 
England to the City of the Popes, thus to manifest 
their gratitude for the Light of the Faith sent thence 
to their own land. Many of these were of royal 
blood — Alfred the Great is said to have been 
brought thither in his boyhood by his father — and 
many chose to finish their mortal course as near as 
they could get to the tomb of the Blessed Peter. 

From a. d. 650 to 800, there is little reliable 
data for the sequence and personages of these English 
pilgrimages to Rome ; but it is certain that by the 
175 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

latter date there was an important English colony in 
the neighborhood of St. Peter's, which had had much 
material, intellectual and spiritual befriending at 
the hands of the Popes, Sts. Leo III. and Leo IV., 
especially the latter. 

The Irish also had been for at least as long 
numerous in Rome. 

The interest felt at the time of Renaissance in the 
history of the early English settlement in Rome is 
best proved by a visit to that one of Raphael's 
" Stanzes " in the Vatican Gallery known as the 
" Stanza of the Incendio del Borgo.'' The frescoes 
which cover the great walls are partly by Raphael 
himself, partly by pupils of Raphael, from their 
master's designs. 

We have the justification of St. Leo III. before 
Charlemagne ; the victory of St. Leo IV. over the 
Saracens at Ostia ; the coronation of Charlemagne in 
St. Peter's ; — but, most striking of all, and there- 
fore giving its name to the apartment, the fire 
in the Saxon Borgo or Burg, in 847. The fire 
is supposed to have started through the carelessness 
of certain residents. You see the group of fugitives, 
including the noble-looking old man carried on the 
shoulders of his son, the young mothers and the 
scantily clad children looking beyond the ineffective 
attempts of men to quench the flames, to the portico 
of St. Peter's in the distance, where Pope St. Leo IV. 
appears holding out the Cross with which he arrests 
176 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

the progress of the fire. There is bold grouping and 
massing of figures, and Raphael's own splendid flesh 
tints. The English King Ethelwolf is introduced 
in the lower part of the picture with Godfrey de 
Bouillon. 

We visited the Borgo itself, with its famous Hos- 
pital and Medical College of Santo Spirito — still 
served by the clerks of the Holy Spirit. Behind it 
is the Church of S. Spirito, formerly St. Mary of 
the Saxons. We visited it and noted the altarpiece, 
representing the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the 
Apostles and the Blessed Mother of God at Pente- 
cost, and the bronze canopy over the altar, said to be 
by Palladio. It has a fine old belfry, but there is a 
lonely air about it all, as if it mourned the ancient 
days. 

St. Mary of the Saxons is mentioned in the Liber 
Pontificales, a. d. 800, and variously thereafter ; as 
also in Papal documents, until the reign of John 
Lackland. He granted its ground to Pope Innocent 
III., who, in 1196, built thereon the Hospital of S. 
Spirito, long the largest establishment of the kind in 
the world, as it is still among the best. 

Another church of the early English in Rome 
which boasted a great antiquity was built in 755 by 
Offa, King of the East Saxons, on what is now the 
Via Monserrato, not far from the great Church of 
the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri. It was destroyed 
by fire in 817. 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

The Church of San Pantaleo, near the Palazza 
Massimo alle Colonne, is mentioned as English under 
Pope Honorius III. (1216-1227), the successor of 
Pope Innocent III. The inscription on its bell sets 
forth that it was put up by English priests in 1243. 

St. Edmund's Hospice, on the Ripa Grande, was 
founded in the Fourteenth Century, for English 
sailo: s of merchantmen and of the Royal Navy, and 
existed for many years as a separate institution. 

Before the fifteenth century, it was merged in the 
Church of St. Thomas and the Holy Trinity, but its 
church and buildings were administered apart. In 
the reign of Pope Gregory XIII., the obligations of 
its church were transferred to the Church of the 
English College, a fact duly recorded on a marble 
slab in the sacristy. The Church of St. Edmund 
was pulled down under Alexander VII. ; and a great 
part of the buildings destroyed after 1870. A small 
part still remains. 

The Church and Hospice of St. Thomas and the 
Holy Trinity — on the site of the ancient church of 
King Offa — was founded after the Second Jubilee, 
1350, by a powerful English confraternity. It 
developed steadily by purchase and by gift ; and 
was the ordinary residence of the English ambassa- 
dors. By 1500 it was decaying, and the so-called 
Reformation poisoned its life. 

In 1575, Pope Gregory XIII. united it with the 
English College already mentioned, into which St. 
178 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Edmund's had been merged ; but of the career of 
these united institutions, more further on. 

We stood across from the Church of St. Chrysog- 
onus, on the Piazza d'ltalia, looking down into a 
station of ancient Roman firemen, unearthed over 
thirty years ago, and then, and still, in very good 
preservation. It is far below the street level, and 
consists of several chambers. There is the place of 
the fountain in the courtyard, and well-defined mosaics 
of Neptune, with his trident and sundry marine 
monsters, in black, on the whitish groundwork. An 
excellent system of water-works, baths and fountains 
innumerable, and an efficient fire service, here so 
long ago ! 

We were in the midst of ruins, and those below 
were not half so full of desolation as those about us. 
Not far from where we stood are the scant and fast- 
crumbling fragments of St. Edmund's, of which I 
have already written. 

In sight, also, are the remains of the old castle of 
the Anguillara family, consisting of the Torre degli 
Anguillara and the Arco delV Annunziata. The 
latter takes its name from the fresco still to be seen 
on the wall. 

It was a bright, warm day, and little green lizards 
came out and sunned themselves — they are used to 
Americans, and not easily disturbed anyhow — and 
little children, as agile and bright-eyed as the lizards, 

179 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

but not equally irreproachable as to toilet, came out 
of houses somewhat less ruinous-looking than the 
ruins, and regarded us with smiling curiosity. 

" The church yonder, St. Chrysogonus', was Car- 
dinal Langton's titular church," said the Roman 
citizen. " This is rather in the line of 'continuity.' 
Shall we go over and see it?" 

I needed no urging. What visions rise at the 
name of Langton! The intrepid Cardinal Arch- 
bishop at the head of the English bishops and barons, 
at Runnymede, forcing Magna Charta from the weak 
but tyrannous King John, who yields it "for the 
salvation of our soul, and the soids of all our ances- 
tors and heirs, and unto the honor of God, and the 
advancement of Holy Church, and amendment 
of our realm "! The solemn promulgation of the 
people's rights, and the penalties on whoso dared 
infringe them, with all the splendor of the Old Faith 
in Westminster ! How well Whittier tells it in his 
" Curse of the Charter-Breakers ! " And then he 
looks back at it : 

Seven times the bells have tolled 
For the centuries grey and old, 

Since the priesthood, like a tower, 
Stood between the poor and power : 
And the wronged and trodden down 
Blessed the abbot's shaven crown. 

St. Chrysogonus was one of those soldierly, chival- 
rous saints, akin to St. George, St. Maurice, and 

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WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

St. Sebastian, who having as best he might, protected 
and encouraged the noble Roman lady, St. Anastasia, 
through the fiery ordeal of her martyrdom under the 
Emperor Diocletian, was himself beheaded. He is 
represented in the mosaics in the tribune of his 
church, which is within in the basilica fashion, com- 
panioned by St. James the Great, and attending the 
Blessed Mother enthroned with her Divine Child. 

Among the frescoes from the history of the Trin- 
itarians who serve the church, we noted one of ex- 
ceeding beauty. A good old lay brother, so runs 
the story, finding himself alone in the monastery, 
his superior brethren being absent on their work of 
ransoming captives, ministering to the imprisoned 
and the like, still rang the bell duly for the various 
hours of the Divine Office, grieving that there were 
none to keep up the splendid service of prayer and 
praise. But, at last, he hears the beloved psalmody, 
as of old, only richer and sweeter ; and hastening to 
the chapel, he finds the stalls filled with angels, in 
the monastic garb, the distinctive cross on their 
hearts, and Our Lady in the Prior's place also 
wearing the Trinitarian Cross — Heaven thus supply- 
ing for the spiritual service of those who gave them- 
selves to the relief of the pressing temporal sufferings 
of the down-trodden and afflicted. The ethereal 
loveliness of the angels and the Blessed Virgin 
Mother must be seen to be appreciated. 

It is an abrupt diversion from English " con- 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

tinuity," — but the heavenly presages of our own 
American flag and its mission are nearer to us. 
How few of the hundred thousands who have read 
Emma C. Dawson's magnificent poem, " Old Glory," 
have understood the religious symbolism interwoven 
with it ! 

Well, St. John of Matha gives the explanation. 
Having made his studies at the University of Paris 
— his life began in 1154 — he was ordained a priest, 
and at his first celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of 
the Mass, he beheld an angel clothed in white, with 
a cross of red and blue on his breast, and his hands 
resting on the heads of two slaves, who knelt, one 
on each side of him. It was to the }'Oimg priest, 
God's showing of his life-work. He forsook the 
world, and in a desert place in company with the holy 
Felix of Valois, drew up the constitutions of the 
Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption 
of Captives. The two friends set out for Rome 
together, and were most kindly received by Pope 
Innocent III., who had had a like vision, but a more 
specific one, since in his, the captives between whom 
the angel stood were a white Christian and a swarthy 
Moor, signifying that the new Order in its benefac- 
tions should recognize no distinction of color, race, 
or creed. Moreover, His Holiness decreed the dress 
of the new Brotherhood, and the significance of its 
color and emblems. The habit was white, and on 
the breast of it, a Greek cross of red and blue. The 

182 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity were thus 
typified ; the Eternal Father by the white ; the Son, 
the Divine Redeemer by the blue, the transverse of 
the Cross ; and the Holy Spirit by the red. 

The saint's vision, his Brotherhood's institution, 
and his hardships in the service of the slave, moved 
Whittier to his noble poem, " The Mantle of St. 
St. John de Matha " : 

A strong and mighty Angel, 

Calm, terrible, and bright, 
The cross in blended red and blue 

Upon his mantle white ! 
Two captives by him kneeling, 

Each on his broken chain, 
Sang praise to God, who raiseth 

The dead to life again ! 
Dropping his cross-wrought mantle, 

" Wear this," the Angel said ; 
" Take thou, Freedom's priest, its sign, — 

The white, the blue, the red." 
Then rose up John de Matha, 

In the strength the Lord Christ gave, 
And begged through all the land of France, 

The ransom of the slave. 

At last, outbound from Tunis, 

His bark her anchor weighed, 
Freighted with seven score Christian souls 

Whose ransom he had paid. 
But, torn by Paynim hatred, 

Her sails in tatters hung ; 
And on the wild waves rudderless, 

A shattered hulk she swung. 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Then up spake John de Matha, 

" God's errands never fail ! 
Take thou the mantle which I wear, 

And make of it a sail. ' ' 

They raised the cross wrought mantle, 

The blue, the white, the red ; 
And straight before the wind off shore, 

The ship of Freedom sped. 

And on the walls the watchers, 

The ships of mercy knew, — 
They knew far off its holy cross, 

The red, the white, the blue. 

And the bells in all the steeples, 

Rang out in glad accord, 
To welcome home to Christian soil 

The ransomed of the Lord. 

So runs the ancient legend 

By bard and painter told ; 
And lo ! the cycle rounds again, 

The new is as the old. 

And the American poet read the moral to his 
countrymen, in the Civil War, for the freedom of 
the negro slave. 

Is not your sail the banner 

Which God hath blest anew, 
The mantle that de Matha wore. 

The red, the white, the blue ? 

Take heart from John de Matha ! — 
God's errands never fail. 

I grew familiar with the sight of the red, white, 
and blue of the Trinitarians while I stayed in Rome. 

184 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Would that Whittier had seen the glories of the 
Eternal City in its memorials and its men, even as 
Wendell Phillips beheld St. Peter's, and the black 
priest at its altars of sacrifice ! 

But we are far from Stephen Langton, in time, if 
not in spirit, so we shall leave this intrepid successor 
of St. Augustine and St. Thomas a Becket, and stop 
for a few moments again at St. Gregory's, on the 
Ccelian Hill. 

Over three centuries later, when the divorce of 
Henry VIII. from Katharine of Arragon was pend- 
ing, Sir Edward Crane was one of the commissioners 
appointed to get the opinion of the foreign univer- 
sities, and especially of the Court of Rome. Kath- 
arine had appealed to the Pope. Crane's opinion of the 
King's late-felt scruples is evident from the fact that 
he never returned to England. Elizabeth recalled 
him, when she suppressed the English Embassy at 
Rome, but he, having a care for his head, stayed on, 
under the protection of Pope Paul IV., and died 
there in 1561. His tomb is in St. Gregory's with 
that of another exile for conscience' sake, Robert 
Pecham, who died six years later. 

The palace which was once the English Embassy, 
is now the residence of John C. Hey wood, an Ameri- 
can Catholic, a native of Philadelphia, and well known 
as poet and novelist. 

The English College and the Church of St. Thomas 
a Becket, on the Via Monserrato (St. Thomas of the 
185 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

English, as the Italians call it), may now be said to 
sum up all the associations of England in Rome — 
the Borgo, St. Pantaleo, St. Edmund. 

The English College began to prepare for the 
reconquest of England to the Faith during the very- 
reign of Elizabeth. It was first in the hands of the 
Jesuits, and many a priest, including Blessed Edmund 
Campion, who was destined to make the "second 
spring " of the Church of England possible, by his 
mission work and martyrdom, was trained here. 

Among the post-Reformation guests at this college, 
we find record, strangely enough, of the poet Milton. 

The Church of the Oratorians of St. Philip Neri, 
Sta. Maria in Valicella, is near the English College, 
and I saw the place where the Saint used to stand to 
give his blessing to the English students, as they 
went their way to the lectures at the University, with 
the salutation, "All hail, Flowers of the Martyrs ! " 

It is told that once a student refused to approach 
for St. Philip's blessing, and that when the supreme 
test of his faith and courage came in England, he 
failed miserably, and renounced the Church. 

The early association of St. Philip Neri with the 
young English missionaries is remarkable, when it is 
remembered what an important part in the recon- 
quest of England to the Faith was awaiting his own 
disciples at a later day. 

This English College remained in charge of the 
Jesuits until the suppression of the Society in 1773 ; 
186 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

but it did not revert to them on the Restoration. It 
remained under the protection of the Pope until 
1798. It was pillaged and left, within, at least, in 
an almost ruinous condition during the French inva- 
sion of that year. In 1818 it was restored and 
re-opened, with the Rev. Dr. Gradwell as rector. Its 
most famous modern pupil and subsequent rector 
was Nicholas Wiseman, later Cardinal Archbishop of 
Westminster, England, whose connection with the 
college was almost unbroken from 1818 till 1840. 

The English College entered on another epoch of 
its existence in 1867, when it was reconstructed at 
the instance of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Manning, 
with the Rev. Dr. O'Callaghan, of the Oblates of St. 
Charles, rector. 

Strange to see this evident Irishman in such a 
place ; but the present rector, the Rev. Dr. Prior, 
whom I had the pleasure of meeting, a young, refined, 
ascetic and scholarly-looking gentleman, is also of 
Irish origin. Wiseman, himself, to be sure, was of 
Irish and Spanish blood. 

At the time of our visit, the faculty and students 
were still in villagiatura ; and the Blessed Sacrament 
was removed from the church. This church is 
exceedingly rich in historical associations. It is 
full of pictures of English saints. It has a notable 
relic of the martyred St. Thomas of Canterbury — 
whom the Church honors with the Gospel of the 
Good Shepherd in his Feast Day Mass. 

187 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

It has the tombs of many English notables, both 
preceding and following the days of Henry VIII. 
Among them, we noted those of Christopher Bain- 
bridge, Cardinal Archbishop of York, and ambas- 
sador from England to Pope Julius II., who died in 
Rome in 1514 ; also of Cardinal Allen ; and of a 
little feminine prodigy of learning and piety, Martha 
Swinburne, 1768-1777 — with a long history of 
her short life, pathetic, as full of the grief of her 
bereaved parents, but moving to a faint amusement 
as well. What rank would this little wonder, who 
at nine years of age, was fluent in three modern 
languages, and had " made some progress in the 
Latin tongue " ; was well versed in history, geography 
and mathematics ; " sang the most difficult music at 
sight with one of the finest voices in the world " — 
have attained among the learned ladies of the 
University of Bologna, for example. Undoubtedly 
she would have been a rival of Laura Bassi Verrati. 
who towards the end of the century maintained a 
thesis in Latin before two Cardinals and seven 
professors, holding her own eloquently with them in 
that language of scholars. Poor little Martha! 
was it not infinitely better to go, while you were still 
eligible for the Heaven of little children, than to 
live to develop a brain that might have been a heavy 
burden over a woman's heart? 

We left Martha's memorial, for the most painfully 
interesting sight in the English College — the 
188 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

pictures of English martyrdoms on the walls of the 
triforium of the church. I had previously seen 
some terribly realistic pictures — notably that of the 
martyrdom of St. Erasmus in the Vatican Gallery, 
(in mosaic in St. Peter's), and later I saw in one of 
the professors' parlors at Maynooth, the picture of 
the frightful death of an Irish missionary saint in 
Central Europe. But for a long, progressive, 
accumulation of horrors, it would not be easy to 
surpass this Way of the Cross of the English martyrs 
of Elizabeth's reign. The carrying out of the 
frequent sentence of hanging, drawing, and quarter 
ing, is pictured minutely and faithfully. If you 
have a vivid imagination and a weak heart, you would 
better not go into this triforium. But if you do 
not go, you lose an unexampled opportunity for 
reflecting on the comparatively easy terms on which 
we Catholics of to-day get to Heaven. 

These pictures are contemporary, and were 
witnesses of the greatest value in the case for the 
beatification of three hundred English martyrs by 
Pope Leo XIII. 

The modern England in Rome will have its most 
significant token in the College of St. Bede, which 
was going up rapidly in the form of an addition to 
the English College at the time of my visit. This 
is the gift of Pope Leo XIII., and is destined for 
the theological training and maintenance during the 
student period, of converts from Anglicanism who 

189 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

desire to enter the priesthood. Already these are 
an appreciable factor in the life of Rome. 

The Church of San Silvestro, of which Father 
Whitmee, S. P. M., is rector, is another rallying 
point for English, or, more correctly, English- 
speaking, Catholics in Rome. The little garden 
about the residence of the Fathers, through which 
yon get to the church is most beautifully kept ; and 
the church itself is most interesting historically and 
artistically. The names of Michael Angelo and 
Vittorio Colonna are closely associated with it. 

In recent years, our own Archbishop Keane and 
Father Fidelis, C. P. (Dr. James Kent Stone) have 
alternated as preachers of Advent and Lenten ser- 
mons. Last year, the newly ordained English 
convert priest, Father Basil Maturin (late of the 
Ritualistic Cowley Fathers) preached the Lent 
there. Queen Margherita often worships in this 
church, and makes benefactions to it. 

There are convents of English nuns in Rome now, 
with schools for English-speaking girls. The Eng- 
lish Catholics in the Eternal City have a notable 
leader in the Most Rev. Dr. Stonor, Archbishop of 
Trebizond. 

The impress left by such personalities as those of 
Wiseman, Manning, Newman, Faber, Howard, Talbot, 
Ullathorne, Grant, Vaughan, to mention but a few 
names prominent in England's later ecclesiastical 
history, not to speak at all of the eminent laymen of 
190 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

letters and affairs, is deep and vivid ; the interest of 
the present Holy Father in the reconqnest of Eng- 
land to the Church is a solicitude of fifty years, as 
I heard from his own lips ; and then, the blood 
of the martyrs — English, yea, and Irish — and 
the prayers of the virgin saints ! The long and 
destructive storm has subsided, and there is a rain- 
bow in the sky. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XVIII. 

Ireland and America in Rome. 

Ireland, the ever-faithful and ubiquitous, is rep- 
resented in Rome not only by the Irish College, in 
whose Chapel, St. Agatha's, the heart of the great 
O'Connell rests ; but by a large share in the faculty 
and the students of the English College ; and by 
her buoyant blood and keen intelligence ruling and 
learning in the American College. 

But where is Ireland not represented ? A traveler 
once averred that there was a bit of territory of eight 
square miles on which no Irishman had set foot. 

"How in the world did we overlook it?" asked 
John Boyle O'Reilly. 

The train for Rome was an hour late at Pisa, and 
we continued to lose time. At Olibeto we had a long 
stop, and the guard said with much gesticulation, that 
there would be plenty of time for refreshments. It 
was a cool, bright night. How good a bit of beefsteak 
and a cup of the tea would have been ! but I saw 
only the usual mibuttered ham sandwiches, cakes, 
grapes, and half-bottles of red and white wine. 

Most of us left our carriages for a turn in the fresh 
air. I heard with gladness clear, boyish laughter 
and the English of the United States ; and presently 

192 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

I was in conversation with a curly-headed youth with 
fine grey eyes, and the direct look and simple courtesy 
of the well-bred American. He rendered me some 
very welcome attentions ; and, strangely enough, 
came to my aid again on a memorable day, when I felt 
as one might feel who woke suddenly in some 
tremendous isolation, with all the wires between him 
and the rest of the world hopelessly snapped. 

He was a student of the American College, and 
was a fair specimen of the elect gathering who are 
growing up within its walls, to be, by-and-by, among 
the choicest glories of the Church in their native 
land. 

When first I came to Rome, the faculty and the 
students were at their beautiful summer home, Villa 
Frascati, at Grotta Ferrata, where the Basilian 
Monks of the Greek Rite have their monastery and 
a beautiful little church. 

But the President, the Right Rev. Mgr. William 
H. O'Connell, D. D., was frequently in Rome super- 
vising the improvements which were making in the 
college proper, against the opening of the scholastic 
year in late October, and the Bostonian was soon 
deeply in his debt for many great and much appre- 
ciated kindness. 

The college on the Via dell' Umilta has, on the 
exterior, the usual cloistered aspect of such institu- 
tions in the Eternal City. 

But within there is a fine court-yard garden, with 
193 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

historic orange, oleander, and other flowering trees. 
The reception rooms are cheerful, the walls lined 
with pictures of dignitaries of the Church in Ameri- 
ca, especially of the College alumni who have risen 
to eminence in the Church in their own land. The 
rector's parlors are full of homelike suggestion to 
the visiting American ; and in the College refectory, 
the Blessed Mother of God, who, under the title of 
her Immaculate Conception, is the patroness of the 
United States, and the American shield and eagle, 
are associated in a way to remind one of the devout 
chivalry of mediaeval times. 

The College building is just 301 years in exist- 
ence, the foundation of a lady of the Orsini family, 
for the Dominican Nuns. It passed later into the 
hands of the Visitation Nuns, and evidences of this 
succession of devout habitations are seen in the 
pictures of the saints and the pious devices of both 
Orders in the decorations of the chapel. 

When first I saw the College it was in the hands 
of the renovators ; when I saw it last, it was in all 
the glory of its new electric lighting, in which it 
anticipated the Vatican itself by several months. 

It is naturally, the place to which American Cath- 
olics gravitate ; and far beyond even a high average 
of the priest's and the scholar's spirit of strict 
devotion to duty, and a fine sense of proportion in 
duties, must be the man who acceptably fills the 
office of rector. There is no severer test of a man 
194 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

than this office, and it is high praise of the young 
Boston priest who was sent thither three years ago, 
when the best judges agree that he bears it well. 

Of the nobility of the spiritual and mental train- 
ing, under its whole fortunate succession of rectors, 
the church in America has many living proofs. 
There is sensible, large-minded care for the health of 
the students, coming from other climates and cus- 
toms ; and in the summer home at Villa Frascati, 
which we were privileged to see in all its beauty; 
and still more is the Villa Torlonia, near Castle 
Gondolpho, twelve miles from Rome by the Appian 
Way, which has since superseded it ; there is ample 
chance for wearied bodies and minds to refresh 
themselves, while souls are strengthened and uplifted 
through the environment of natural loveliness and 
the creations of faith-inspired art. 

One thing that a long sojourn in Italy must do for 
a reasoning being is to show him how much of what 
we Americans account indispensable to personal com- 
fort he is better and happier without. 

The spiritual and moral, even the aesthetic, parts 
of our nature are cramped and enfeebled by the 
minutiae of step-saving and bodily coddling generally, 
which prevail in our country ; and it seems to me 
not the least of the good effects of a Roman training 
that its happy possessor must bring home a manly 
contempt for certain petty creature comforts. 

There are the pleasantest relations between the 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



students of the American College and those of the 
Irish and English and Canadian Colleges ; indeed, 
between them and the students of all the national 
colleges ; for nowhere are the national patriotism 
and the spiritual cosmopolitanism which mark the 
true American Catholic, in nobler evidence than in 
the American College. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



XIX. 

Glimpses of the Alps. 

I like best to remember the Savoy Alps. It was 
warmer weather for one thing ; I was alone, comforta- 
ble, quiet. It was a pleasure even to slip down to 
the floor of the railway carriage, and look up, up, up 
to those wonderful masses of stone, projecting over 
a green wall, so to speak, — for grass, and vines and 
shrubs grow straightly up on the steep, almost 
perpendicular sides — and wonder what prehistoric 
giant sculptor carved those wonderful facades. 

Even with a less vivid imagination than mine, the 
beholder could not miss the fortresses and battle- 
ments, the arrested march of mail-clad warriors, 
the anticipative cathedral and minster fronts, the 
processions of bishops, mitred abbots and cowled 
monks. 

Savoy was the country of St. Francis de Sales, 
and I could look across to Geneva, the scene of his 
marvellous episcopate — you remember that he 
converted 70,000 Protestants in his comparatively 
short life ; and think how he loved the Lake, and 
know that Annecy, the cradle of the Visitation 
Order which he founded, is near at hand. 

When I was in Lucerne more than a month late 
although the trees had not dropped their leaves, and 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

the sun was shining brightly, a bitter wind blew 
from the mountains, and during a two hours' ride 
beside the lovely lake, my temperature, bodily and 
mental, fell to the freezing point. I don't like 
the sunshine of cold places, which dazzles the eyes 
but gives no heat. I want gray skies with cold 
weather. 

Yet the scenery was grand beyond my feeble 
descriptive powers ; the town stretching along one 
side of the lake and even turning a curve with it : 
the snow-capped Alps, rising peak over peak, on the 
other. No verdure, nor suggestion of sculptor's hand 
here; huge masses of stone rising gradually to 
tremendous altitudes, the sun glinting on the ever- 
lasting snow, awe-inspiring, terrible. 

I was looking from too far off to note the black 
or white crosses of the Savoy Alps, near some steep 
foothold, with their suggestion of unforgotten tragedy, 
but they abounded, I doubt not, here also. 

And oh ! the world-history of both, from Caesar to 
Napoleon ! For one thing, at least, America with all 
her glory and diversity of natural scenery, must bow 
before Europe. America has no Alps. 

No wonder little Switzerland loves liberty, and 
has an undue proportion of soldier-heroes. What 
can men do who live in sight of the Alps, but live up 
to them, so to speak ? They are terribly strenuous 
pieces of creation, and would give one no peace. 
Life should be one long quest for the Edelweiss. 
198 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

You begin to understand William Tell and Nicholas 
von der Flue only ofter you have gazed upon the 
Alps. 

What a heroic story is this of Lucerne, the little 
Catholic stronghold, beginning a. d. 735, from the 
monastic foundation of St. Leodegar — now also the 
Mecca of the fashionable world's summer pleasure 
seekers ! 

I saw the old flags in the Franciscan Church, near 
the Government Building and the Museum, which 
testify to the splendid share which the men of 
Lucerne had in the wars which won Switzerland's 
independence. These were the worthy descendants 
of the men who successfully resisted, though unto 
blood, when the propagators of the so-called Refor- 
mation tried to force an alien faith upon them. 

Maurice the sainted soldier of the martyred The- 
ban legion, who met his death on the banks of Lake 
Geneva, under the persecuting Emperor Maximin, 
shares with the monk of five centuries later, St. 
Leodegar, the special devotion of the people ; and 
statues of these patron saints are in conspicuous 
evidence. 

The Swiss have fought in the battles of many 
European nations, and the Lion Monument, after 
Thorswalden, on the face of a rock sixty feet high, 
not far from the entrance of the Glacier Garden, 
commemorates the Swiss guards, who fell before the 
Revolutionists in 1792, when the Austro-Prussian 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

army stormed the Tuileries in vain attempt to save 
the unfortunate French King, Louis XVI. 

The Lion monument is familiar through many 
reproductions in picture and carved wood. It is a 
grand Lion, wounded to death, with a faithful 
pathetic face — like the lion of St. Jerome. It rests 
its head on one great paw below the cross-emblazoned 
shield, and the other encircles the emblems of 
Lucerne. Beneath it is the inscription: "Helvetio- 
rumjidei or virtute." It was sculptured in 1821 by 
Ahorn of Constance. 

The monument is reflected on the quiet bosom of 
the small sheet of water just below it, and across 
from it is a little grove of noble trees. 

I lingered a little while in the Glacier Garden to 
see the "pot-holes/' There are nine of them in the 
rocks, and they date from the immemorial recession 
of the gigantic glacier, which is believed to have 
extended from the St. Gothard through the district 
of Lucerne to the north of Switzerland. The largest 
is thirty -one feet deep and twenty^six feet in diameter. 

A summer resort, however great its natural attrac- 
tions, has always a sadness about it after the season. 
It is, on a large scale, that of "the banquet hall 
deserted," as sung by Moore ; which, as a precocious 
child of my acquaintance said, brought always before 
her vision stacks of empty bottles, half-drained 
glasses, and scattered cigar stumps. 

The hotels fronting on the lake were on the point 
200 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

of closing ; those a little farther in had a few linger- 
ers, mostly English people, who bear the cold better 
than Americans, and had need of all their fortitude ; 
for anything more comfortless than the average 
Continental hotel in cold weather I know not. 

Everywhere you saw deserted bandstands. The 
little round tables still stood in the summer houses 
and in the hotel gardens, but they were evidently 
about to be carried into winter quarters. 

It grew dusk early in the valley, by reason of the 
overshadowing mountains, and it was dim enough 
when I entered the Jesuits' church. Emerging, I 
looked up — you are always looking up in Switzerland 
— and what a sight met my eyes ! I had lost the sun 
behind the mountains an hour before. But, lo ! there 
were all the snow-clad peaks aflame with the after- 
glow, towering in their sublimity and heaven-lit 
splendor above the sombre pines and the shadowed 
haunts of men. I forgot the loneliness, the foreboding, 
and the bitter wind. It was the glory of a happy 
death cast down along the whole length of a troubled 
and sorrowful life. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XX. 

Wood-Carving and Dolls' Houses. 

Would you not think that the sublime Alpine 
scenery would be the inspiration of the grandest 
works of art ? But oh ! what a drop from the art 
of Italy to the art of Switzerland! No Michael 
Angelo has risen up in the Alpine land to embody 
in bronze or marble suggestions from God's mar- 
vellous works before him. No Leonardo da Vinci, 
nor Raphael, nor Andrea del Sarto has even faintly 
caught the radiance of the sunset on the snowy 
mountain tops, to touch therewith an opening into 
Heaven, or the wings of a vanishing angel. 

In sight of God's masterpieces in stone men excel 
in the fine art of wood-carving ! So the balance is 
kept, and it remains true of the attractions of the 
lands, as it is of men's and women's, 

" Who least hath some, who most, hath never all." 

After the majestic statues and the glorious pic- 
tures of the Italian churches, the carved choir-stalls 
and the wrought-iron choir-screen of the Hofkirche 
or Cathedral of St. Leodegar lost in impressiveness. 
Yet, they are ingeniously beautiful and bear long- 
study. The hands that wrought so long and 
patiently on these, as well as on the curious carvings 
202 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

of the northern side-altar over four hundred years 
ago, were moved by the same spirit of faith that 
rounded the dome of St. Peter's, or upcast the 
arches of the Cathedral of Cologne, or drew down 
for the age-long joy of earth a faint reflection of the 
glory of heaven in the Sistine Madonna. 

Those broad-faced, neutral tinted pictures of holy 
personages are almost painful to you after the ether- 
eal, delicately tinted Virgins and angels of Fra 
Angelico, that you left the other day in Florence ; 
but the votive offerings of answered prayer are at 
their shrines also ; and after you have seen the men 
and women of Switzerland and Belgium, you realize 
that the artist, even in his dreams of Heaven, is 
influenced deeply by his human environment. 

Behind the church — which was undergoing some 
renovations at the time of my visit — and between it 
and the residence of the canons, lies the old church- 
yard of St. Leodegar. There are quaintly inscribed 
memorial tablets on the walls of the cloister, and 
monuments, ingenious rather than lovely in their 
plan. But never was a resting place of the dead 
kept with more tender care or scrupulous neatness. 
I saw it swept and garnished, so to speak, for the 
near-at-hand All Souls' Day. Mural tablets, monu- 
ments and headstones bore those prim, long-lasting 
memorial-wreaths, which they are so fond of in 
Europe, even in the land of flowers itself. Did not 
an alert vender of these tributes of affection chase 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

our carriage almost to the gates of the Campo Santo 
at S. Lorenzo outside the walls, at Rome? and are 
they worse after all, than our own rigid floral pillars, 
"gates ajar," and harps? 

Coming down the long stone steps of St. Leodegar, 
I met a Philadelphia lady who had been passing the 
summer in Switzerland, and was getting ready to 
winter in Egypt. But everywhere you meet this 
kind of an American ; and the Australians will soon 
be our rivals in globe circuiting. 

Switzerland is the paradise of neatness. As I 
drove in the outskirts of Lucerne, it seemed to me 
that the very grass had been swept and dusted, and 
the dogs and cats all looked as if they had just been 
scrubbed and brushed within an inch of their lives. 

Shop-keeping was glorified here ; no dingy, one- 
windowed length in a block, but a pretty little one- 
story room, set beside the proprietor's house — not 
joined to it — glass on two sides, and with such 
dainty household goods on view, that the least domes- 
tic of women would be seized with a desire to start 
housekeeping at once. 

An old-fashioned New England matron would 
weep with joy at the neatness of the back yards ; the 
firewood laid close by the kitchen doors in the trim- 
mest, most symmetrical piles, not a weed, nor a scrap 
of tin, or cord, or paper in sight. 

It was all on a rather small scale, too, somewhat 
suggestive of dolls' housekeeping, and the household 
204 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

goods, especially the kitchen furnishings, even in the 
more pretentious shops on the Alpen-Strasse, bore 
out the same idea. The tidiness of the women 
minded one of wax-work and wood-carving, and pres- 
ently, as I heard the tinkle, tinkle, up and down the 
hillsides, and the well-cared for cows came in sight, I 
said to myself : " Here are doll-cows to match the 
doll-people ;" for truly they looked as if they might 
have stepped out of the Noah's Arks of my childhood. 

In some of the churches, the precautions to ensure 
daily neatness, seemed to me excessive. 

In two of those which I visited, a railing is set up 
against the last pillars of the nave, so that you can 
enter a few feet into the church, and kneeling on the 
prie-dieu set against the railing, behold the altar in 
the distance and the light which tells of the abiding 
Sacred Presence ; but you cannot carry the dust of 
the wayside over the spotless floor, nor view the 
decorations at close range, except on special occasions. 

In Switzerland, too, you become aware of the 
proximity of Protestantism by the Protectant fashion 
of pews in the nave of the Catholic churches. 

There is one Protestant church in Lucerne for the 
benefit of the 4,000 Protestants, who, as a local pub- 
lication naively puts it, " live in perfect concord with 
the Catholic population," numbering 21,000 — and 
another, an Anglican house of worship was building 
at the time of my visit for the benefit of the numerous 
English summer residents professing that belief. 
205 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Devout, brave, simple-hearted, frugal and laborious 
people these Swiss Catholics evidently are. I woke 
very early the morning I was to leave Lucerne, as I 
had to take the train betimes, if I would reach 
Cologne before nightfall. But earlier even than 
the hour at which I had to rise, I heard the footsteps 
of the men and the youth on the way to their daily 
labor. And among all the footsteps I noted those 
of one who walked with a spring, and whistled as he 
went. Such a melodious, sustained whistle — the 
voice of a clear conscience, a happy heart, and a 
sound body bearing on to a well-loved task. 

I see the after glow on the Alps, when I think of 
Lucerne, but I hear that cheery, early morning- 
whistle. 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 



XXI. 

Notre Dame de Namur. 

You feel the kinship of the Cathedral of Milan 
and its still more splendid brother, the Cathedral of 
Cologne ; and the common blood-beat between the 
historic incidents of the life of the almost modern 
St. Charles Borromeo, blazoned on the banners in 
the nave of the former which holds his blessed 
remains, and the brief scriptural record of the 
Magi, or Kings of the East, whose dust is treasured 
beneath the glorious arches of the latter. 

But Milan, whose succession of Christian bishops 
dates from 51 A. D., is like a thriving American 
city, while Cologne, of later Christianity, and of a 
people ordinarily out-classing aught of sunny Italy 
in material progress, is full of the tinted mist 
of legend, devout, romantic, uncanny, yea, even 
diabolical. 

How well those hours of your journey along the 
banks, vine-clad and castle crowned, of the storied 
Rhine, prepare you for it ! 

Just as your fancy constructs a bridge from the 

pinnacles of the Domo of Milan to those of the 

Domhoff of Cologne, so does it span the spaces 

between the churches of Lucerne and those of 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Namur. For there are curious resemblances between 
the Alpine people and the expression of their 
spiritual aspirations and their material needs, and 
those of more prosaic-looking- Belgium. The roots 
of these are largely in their common faith, but also 
in the well developed practical, not to say, utilitarian 
streak in the characters of both. 

Great faith and devout enthusiasm, combined 
with hard common sense, have always marked 
religious founders and missionaries ; and in the 
production of these little Belgium almost rivals 
France herself. 

Where will you not find Belgian missionaries, 
whether you seek the leper settlement of Molokai, or 
the Congo, or Farther India, or South America, or 
the dwindling Indian reservations of our own United 
States ? And the Belgian nuns are equally generous 
volunteers for foreign missions, and almost equally 
world-spread. 

I had come on from Cologne to Namur to see a 
dear little friend in the novitiate at the mother house 
of the Sisters of Notre Dame. It is so common 
among us Catholics to see a girl in full bloom of 
youth and beauty, turning from all the allurements 
of love and the promise of intellectual distinction, 
and without the slightest excuse of bereavement or 
other great personal sorrow, to the life of religious 
self-denial and consecration, that we make no wonder 
of it. It means only that in some mysterious way a 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

glimpse has been vouchsafed her of the King in His 
beauty, and that all things else have fallen into 
insignificance. 

" We needs must love the highest when we see it." 

Walking in the quaint garden or the broad and 
cheerful tiled corridors of the convent with the 
white-veiled novice, who had in aspect dropped seven 
years off her short life and become a merry-hearted 
child again, the literary career that so easily might 
have been, seemed a paltry thing beside the high 
purpose ever before those bright, uplifted eyes — the 
surpassing recompense at the end of the straight, 
safe path on which those young feet were set. 

European convents do not present the cheerful 
exterior of American convents, and Notre Dame of 
Namur was no exception. But once beyond the 
symbolic narrow gateway and the little window in 
the wall, all was bright and cheerful enough to 
reassure even a fond mother. 

I had another interest beside the little novice. 
The Sisterhood of Notre Dame, founded, like so many 
other teaching religious communities, immediately 
after the French Revolution, all profiting in their 
spirit and aims of the lessons preached by that dire 
social upheaval, is much thought of and talked of 
today in American religious circles. 

Did its modest foundress, Julia Billiart, who fore- 
saw so many things, foresee that when she was sow- 
ing the seeds of rudimentary education for daughters 

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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

of the people in desolated France, she was also 
planting for the college training of girls in far 
America? Perhaps she did, but we are more 
inclined to think that it was as remote from her vision 
at the time, as was the idea from the minds of men 
in general, that the daughters of the people any- 
where should ever want college education. Even 
several decades later, daughters of the people in 
Massachusetts itself went to the rather limited public 
schools of the time for only part of the year. An 
effort was made, however, to do a little better for 
the boys. These were the days of nature in regard 
to the sexes. The woman suffragist had not arisen ; 
Tennyson had not written " The Princess," and 
Protestants knew not of the University of Bologna, 
with its occasional women professors and frequent 
girl students, nor how Shakespeare had come to 
think of Portia. 

In working for Heaven, we always plant or build 
better than we know ; and the evolution of the work 
of the Sisterhood of Notre Dame from the poor 
schools of France to the State schools of Belgium, 
the normal schools of England, and Trinity College 
of America is perfectly logical, religiously and 
socially. 

It was only seven years before Mother Julie's 
death that she established the mother house of her, 
by that time, flourishing institute in Namur, in the old- 
time mansion of the Counts Quarre, in the Rue des 
210 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Fosses. Here are many memorials of the venerable 
foundress ; and in the little Gothic chapel at the end 
of the spacious garden, her remains rest, with those 
of her beloved friend, the co-foundress of the Insti- 
tute, Mother St. Joseph, in the world, the Countess 
Blin-Bourdon. 

Besides the brief inscriptions setting forth the 
lives and works of these servants of God, one sees 
conspicuous, the motto of the Venerable Mother 
Julie. Ah que le bon Dieu est bon! — "How good 
the good God is !" 

Here nuns and pupils love to come and pray, and 
not the least frequent of the petitions before the 
altar is that soon they may be able to invoke her — 
whose high place in Heaven and power with Him 
she served so well has been already miraculously 
attested — as "Blessed Julia Billiart." 

It is worth noting that even in Mother Julie's 
own lifetime the comprehensiveness of her daughters' 
work as teachers was understood. The Boarding- 
School at Namur was well begun, and the free 
schools flourished. 

"To help you to attain that sublime end, the 
Christian education of youth, more surely," said the 
priest who preached the Sisters' annual Retreat in 
1810, " God wills you to enjoy a certain considera- 
tion, a reputation for learning and virtue, without 
which people would not entrust their children to 
you." 

211 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

No convent of Notre Dame was founded in Eng- 
lish-speaking countries in Mother Julie's day, nor 
for long after. She died in 1816. 

In 1843, the Redemptorist Fathers obtained a 
little colony from Namur to teach the children of 
the Catholic poor at Penryn, London ; but it is 
probable that the growth of the community would 
have been exceedingly slow but for the Hon. Mrs. 
Petre, daughter of Lord Stafford, and widow of the 
Hon. Edward Petre, who entered the community at 
Namur in 1850, putting a goodly fortune at the dis- 
posal of the needy community and — still more valu- 
able — her own large-minded virtue, intellectual 
training and social experience in many lands. 

Mrs. Petre, or Sister Mary of St. Francis, as she 
was known in religion, was a woman of great personal 
beauty, and her portrait, with those of the Foundresses, 
is in the drawing-room of the Convent at Namur. 
She filled successively the offices of Mistress of 
Postulants, Mistress of Novices, assistant to the 
Mother General of the Institute, and Superior of the 
Convent at Namur, dying in that office in 1886. 

There are many nuns at Namur who had the 
privilege of the training and the intimate friendship 
of Sister Mary of St. Francis; many more in the 
convents in England. These now number eighteen, 
and she was the foundress of most of them. One of 
her spiritual daughters gave me many reminiscences of 
her ; so that I was the better prepared to appreciate 
212 



WELL-TEODDEN WAYS. 

the splendid life recently published in England and 
America, — and opportunely, in view of the opening 
of Trinity College, and the natural interest of 
English-speaking people in her to whom the Institute 
owes so much of its development in English-speaking 
lands. 

I was much interested in the thoroughness of the 
training of these religious for their life-work. There 
are two " houses of study " within the enclosure ; one 
for the Belgian religious, who have to make a four 
years' course and pass the examinations of the Belgian 
University before they are admitted to teach in any 
of the Belgian schools; the other for the English- 
speaking religious — American, Irish, English, and 
Scotch being all represented here — in which the 
course is three years, and the required examinations, 
those of Oxford, or St. Andrew's University, 
Scotland. 

The convent church is most artistic and devotional 
— the High Altar is of pure white marble, with 
adoring angels in gold bronze. 

The buildings devoted to the novitate and pro- 
fessed house are very large, and there is also a fine 
boarding school. The convent possesses many art- 
treasures, among them a Nativity, by Rubens, and 
an Entombment of Christ, by Vandyke. 

Namur can be called as Montreal is, "The City 
of Mary," for nowhere is devotion to the Blessed 
Mother of God more intense and manifest. There is 
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NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

a tradition of a statue of our Lady brought thither 
by the first preacher of the Faith, a disciple of St. 
Peter himself. 

Don John of Austria, the hero of the battle of 
Lepanto — won through the intercession of Our 
Lady of the Rosary — is buried in the Church of St. 
Aubain. 

Long ago, St. Juliana of Liege, to whom we owe 
the Feast of Corpus Christi, found refuge in Namur 
when persecution had driven her from her own 
convent. 

The city is at the junction of the rivers Sambre 
and Meuse, and is crowned by an almost impregnable 
citadel. It was taken, however, by Louis XIV. of 
France, and retaken by William of Orange in 1695. 

There is a chapel, " Our Lady of the Ramparts." 

The city is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin under 
the title of her Immaculate Conception, and there 
are civic processions in her honor twice a year ; on 
the feasts of the Visitation and the Immaculate 
Conception. 

Namur is an exceedingly clean and bright city. I 
came thither on a Sunday evening. The devotions 
of the day were over, and, on the business streets, the 
restaurants, provision shops, repositories of bric-a- 
brac, etc., were open and brilliantly lighted. No 
traffic was going on, however, except an occasional 
purchase of necessary food. Men and women, in 
holiday costume, walked in groups, or gathered in 
214 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

the cheerful shops to chat. There was no noise, no 
drunkenness. 

Perhaps it was very reprehensible to have these 
shops open. In London, at the same hour, all the 
shops were religiously closed. The liquor saloons^ 
however, were considerately opened from one to 
three — for the convenience of people returning from 
church — and again in the evening from seven till 
eleven. But you could not buy a cake of soap or a 
spool of thread. That would be to desecrate the 
Sunday. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XXII. 
A Bit of Irish Ivy. 

A mother who idealized the land of her birth, who 
had the poetry, the music, the tragedy of it in her 
veins, albeit her years in it were brief, and her 
experience only of a little Cathedral town ; and a 
father who was, like many other men of Irish blood, 
an American born in exile, so to speak, gave the 
writer her earliest impressions of the Island of 
Destiny. She took most from her father's side, she 
believed, and grew up in a sublime confidence in 
Here and Now ; abhoring retrospection and the past 
tense generally, and believing that the Irish battle 
could be infallibly and speedily won, if only the Irish 
would use American weapons, real and symbolic. 

It is true that sometimes the minor note in a half 
laughing song, the queer Oriental phrase, of Scriptu- 
ral strength and vividness, in a ballad of humble life, 
troubled the depths of being and consciousness ; 
reminding me of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 
words — 

"A light song overcomes me like a dirge." 

But it is only truth to say, that I never realized 
what the heritage of blood meant, until on the day- 
dawn when, with a knock at my stateroom door, came 
the magical words — 

216 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

" Come on deck quickly ; we are in sight of 
Ireland." 

Then up leaped that quicksilver current, fluttering 
my heart, and throbbing in my temples, and filling 
my vision with the misty shapes of inherited mem- 
ories. A hasty toilette, a hastier cup of strong coffee, 
and I was on deck with an expectant group hushed 
before the beauty of the land and the sunrise. 

A low-lying land, sloping gently to the sea ; such 
a deep dark green, ribbed and crossed with brown 
furrows. Above it, mists of pearl and violet, shot 
through with the long red beams of the rising sun. It 
had been a clouded passage, and this was our first 
sunrise, almost our first sight of the sun in eight 
days. 

Far inward, Queenstown lay like a remote white 
marble city. On one side, over the castle-like build- 
ing on Roche's Point, fluttered the red pennant 
of the Dominion Line. On the other was a deserted 
stone chapel. 

In that early prismatic radiance, every thing had 
a remote, mysterious, utterly dreamlike aspect. I 
thought of Keats' " Fairy Land forlorn." 

I thought of Boyle O'Reilly's invocation : 

Land of Yesterday — and of Tomorrow ? 

But of all the poems inspired by a glimpse of the 
beautiful Irish coast, I thought most of Mary Eliza- 
beth Blake's. Not all of it fitted a mood less joyous 
217 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

than its author's, but here are lines for the beat of 
the Irish blood, whencesoever it turns back to its 
fountain : 

Sure if I never had heard 

What land had given me birth, 

And cradled the spirit's bird 
On its first weak flight to earth ; 
If I never had heard the name of thy sorrow and strength 

divine, 
Or felt in my pulses the flame of the fire they had caught 

from thine, 
I should know by this rapture alone, that sweeps thro' me now 

like a flood, 
That the Irish skies were my own, and my blood was the 

Irish blood ! 

Proud did I hold my race, 

Yet knew not what pride might dare ; 

Fair did I deem thy face, 
But never one half so fair ; 
Like a dream with deep happiness fraught that some happier 

dawn makes true, 
Nothing was glad in my thought but gladdens still more in 

you, 
From ivied tower and wall, and primrose pale on the lea ; 
To vales where the bright streams call to the lilting bird In 

the tree. 

Yet I was not glad, but burdened with a strange, 
sweet loneliness, that followed me all the day, and 
brought all sorts of half-forgotten things clearly 
before me, as if they rose out of the water, as we 
journeyed presently in a strong sunshine, and with a 
chilly breeze across the Irish Sea. 

I had forgiven the soft-voiced and very communi- 
218 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

cative lads who brought on yesterday's papers at 
Queenstown. I felt more tolerant of the past tense, 
a little doubtful of the immediate adaptability of 
American methods, and renewed my faith in " Mal- 
achy's collar of gold." 

It was two months later, however, before I actually 
set foot on Irish soil, and proved that, in this case, 
at least, distance is not needed to lend enchantment 
to the view. For, as Thackeray truly said, long ago, 
Ireland is, after Italy, the loveliest country of 
Europe. It has in a greater degree even than Italy, 
the dream-like fairyland charm. It was November 
when I made my little sojourn on those enchanted 
shores ; but with the mildness of mid-May in the air. 

It rained a good deal — it rains a little almost any 
time in Ireland, for the Weather Queen is easily 
moved to tears, and has much to sadden her when 
she looks at the human aspect of the land — but it 
was a warm and gentle rain, and the sun would 
break through the cloud and mist in a pleasant, 
unforeseen Celtic way. 

The clouds hang very low in Ireland. You would 
think you could almost reach up and touch them ; 
and they are always soft gray clouds with a veritable 
silver lining. 

Ireland is not greener than England or Wales — 
but while the verdure of those two lands is of uni- 
form tint, that of Ireland is strangely variegated. 
The soil of Ireland is of a rich brown hue, broken 
219 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

into little knolls. On the top of these, the grass is 
of a deep, dark velvety hue. - On the sides, it shades 
off like moss into the palest greens. 

Then everywhere is that wonderful " Ivy of 
Ireland," of which Sarah M. B. Piatt once sang so 
sweetly. It trails on the earth with the shamrocks, 
it climbs walls and fences, it drapes the ruins — ah, 
me, there are too many ruins in Ireland ! — it swathes 
the newest little railroad stations. It seems to reach 
out to the wayfarer with clinging and caressing 
fingers, which would weave a spell about him if he 
would let them, and transport him back to the days of 
Deirdre and the sons of Uisne, and all the wonders 
of her morning twilight of which Ireland's rivers 
still sing and dream. 

It was November, but the trees in the parks in 
Dublin were just yellowing here and there, and had 
hardly dropped a leaf. The little shrubs with pink 
and purple berries, were growing cheerfully ; black- 
berries were ripening on the walls, near the Jesuits' 
College at Milltown. I saw a few lingering, late 
white roses in Jane Barlow's garden at Raheny. 
There was a brave show of asters and dahlias in the 
little walled garden of Villa Nova, at Blackrock, 
where Rosa Mulholland — Lady Gilbert — lives in 
the strict seclusion of her widowhood. 

Dublin is rather an English-looking city. It 
suggests London on a very small scale. I never saw 
so high an average of feminine beauty, and the 
220 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

daughters of the wealthier and more cultivated fam- 
ilies were vastly more stylish, magnetic, and original 
than the English girls. There is a curious suggestion 
both of America and France about them, while they 
have their own delicious wit and pathos to individ- 
ualize them. 

Not a few Dublin women have attained distinction 
by their pens in the Irish Literary Revival, but 
many of these have made marriages which settle them 
in London as in the case of Katherine Tynan Hink- 
son and Mrs. Clement Shorter (Dora Sigerson); or 
are drawn thither by the literary form of the attrac- 
tion of gravitation, as in the case of that brilliant 
novelist and essayist, and althogether fascinating 
woman, Charlotte O'Connor Eccles. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XXIII. 

A Literary Fairy Godfather and Other 
People of the Pen. 

Who has worked so long, so modestly, so consist- 
ently and so fruitfully for the Irish Literary Revival 
as Father Matthew Russell, S. J., for many years 
connected with the Jesuits' Church on Upper Gardiner 
Street, Dublin, now resident at the college on St. 
Stephen's Green? Here he has the offices of the 
Irish Monthly, through whose pages many an author 
now famous in all lands of English speech, first 
began to find a public. 

If you spend even a little time among the Irish 
literary workers, in their own country or in England, 
who have developed within the past three decades, 
you will, of necessity, hear much about Father 
Russell. He has been the foster-father of nearly all 
of them ; and who has not something to tell you of 
the value of his kindly criticism, his unfailing 
encouragement, his practical help in trying times ? 

" What does he look like ? " asks a young American 
reader ; for, indeed, Father Russell's helpful interest 
in young literary workers has bridged the seas, and 
his name is as well known and beloved among 
Catholics in the United States as in his native land. 

A man of medium height, erect and vigorous 
222 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

looking, a high-bred face, devoid, however, of pride, 
but full of sweetness and patience ; the wholesome 
white and red Irish color, and abundant soft gray 
hair. 

"How old?" 

To this I must answer as the good old Irish 
woman answered, when asked a similar question 
about some celebrity, to whom she gave her warm- 
hearted, admiring loyalty. 

" Ah, no age at all, dear ; " for verily age has 
naught to do with men like Father Russell, except 
to make them better and more interesting. The 
perpetual youth of the heart and soul has a marvellous 
effect even upon the poor perishing body ; and, in so 
far forth, Father Russell is as young as the youngest 
of his literary proteges. 

I noted two traits which strikingly individualize 
him; his kindness and his happy heartedness. 1 
cannot imagine how a human being could be kinder, 
more thoughtful, more unselfish. 

He comes of good old stock, as they say in Ireland. 
The Russells of Killowen have written their record 
large in the political and religious history of their 
native Ireland, and of the land which for so many 
centuries has dealt hardly with it. Patriots always, 
yet their forceful personalities compelled recognition 
from those who loved not Irish patriotism. 

The present Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir 
Charles Russell, is not alone a fervent Catholic, but 
223 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

an open and above-board Irish Home Ruler. He is 
the first Catholic Lord Chief Justice of England 
since the days of Mary Tudor. 

It is a little strange that both he and his immediate 
predecessor, Lord Coleridge, should each have had a 
brother in the Society of Jesus. 

Lord Russell's brief visit to America, a few years 
ago, was chiefly to see his sister, Mother Baptista 
Russell, the pioneer Sister of Mercy on the Pacific 
Coast. She has since passed away from earth. 
Three other daughters of this family became members 
of the same beautiful religious institute. 

Father Russell has never visited America. Indeed, 
he is but little fond of travel. A few years in 
France when he was preparing for the priesthood, 
and occasional trips to London, are the only breaks 
in his quiet life in his beloved Ireland. 

And how he loves it! The devoted Irish priest 
is like a priest of olden Israel in this that his 
patriotism and his religion are inextricably blent 
together. To serve his nation is to serve his faith 
and vice versa. 

It was this intertwined religion and patriotism 
which led to the establishment of the Irish Monthly. 
Very interesting was it to hear Father Thomas 
Finlay, another brilliant Irish Jesuit, tell of the 
preliminary attempts (in which he was much con- 
cerned), at founding a literary periodical, which 
should be truly Catholic, and especially helpful to 
224 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

the development of Irish ability in letters. Finally 
the Irish Monthly was evolved, and Father Russell 
has been its head and front, and its heart as well, 
from the beginning. 

Father Russell took as much pleasure in showing 
me the pictures of his contributors, which fill a great 
album, as would a fond father in displaying the 
olive-branches about his hearth-stone. 

Now, I humbly hold it against St. Ignatius Loyola 
that he was so inflexibly a man's man ; and I have 
known certain of his sons whose spirit to the devout 
sex might be aptly summed up as " Tolerari potest." 

But Father Russell is fatherly to the gifted daugh- 
ters as well as to the gifted sons of Erin, and has 
opened his columns to literary contributions from 
other lands, and even from outside the Catholic fold. 

How sweet is Father Russell's solicitude, not only 
for the literary fame, but for the personal well-being 
of all these ! 

Was there ever a man, of all our men, except John 
Boyle O'Reilly, who cared so much and so effectively 
about promoting other people's fame in literature? 
"He thinks of things for me that I should never 
have thought of for myself," said one, echoing the 
grateful thought of a hundred. 

Father Russell is an author of no small desert 
himself ; but the putting forth of his literary gift is 
a part and parcel of his unselfish spirit. 

He does the editor's and reviewer's work on his 
225 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Monthly ; and what prompt kindly reviews, getting 
at the best thing in the book in a couple of lines, and 
saying it in the large, gracious way in which the writer 
would have it said ! Much of Father Russell's other 
prose-work and many of his poems have made their 
first appearance also in the Irish Monthly. 

His collected prose-writings and poems up to date 
make a charming little library ; and the reason for the 
being of all these books is the author's desire to share 
with others the happiness which he has found in God, 
and in the beautiful things of nature which God 
would have us enjoy. 

Father Russell gets such joy out of his religion 
that it makes him see everything with a sort of spir- 
itual color of rose. He proves in his own person 
that to live sincerely in God's presence, and on com- 
radely terms with the Blessed Ones, by no means 
lessens a man's love for his fellow-creatures, or his 
appreciation of all that is beautiful, kindly and sweet 
in the world about us. Literature is to him not an 
end, but one of the most effective means to the 
greatest of ends. Hence for its glorious possibilities 
of good he would urge it on the gifted children of his 
native land ; and also that their Faith and Nationhood 
be not reproached for their lack of diligence in the 
cultivation of the talents lent them by the Master. 

No, my dear reader, who have just been so de- 
lighted with " Nanno," I cannot answer all you ask 
about Rosa Mulholland — or Lady Gilbert, as the 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

social world knows her — for I was privileged to see 
her in her house of mourning, and we cannot con- 
siderately unveil that sacred seclusion. Rosa Mul- 
holland was married nearly ten years ago to Sir John 
Gilbert, the historian, of Dublin, and for seven years 
they lived a life of idyllic happiness in their rose- 
embowered Villa Nova, at Blackrock, a suburb of 
Dublin. Death came very suddenly to Sir John Gil- 
bert, a year ago last May, and ever since his widow 
lives in deep seclusion, in the home whose associ- 
ations, erst so happy, are now so blessed, engaged m 
literary work and works of charity. 

I have visited the scene of the daily labors of this 
profound scholar and thinker in the Dublin Museum, 
and realized, as I glanced at the heaps of folios 
embodying the results of his patient research and 
fine discrimination, what a debt his country owes 
him ; and, further, from the revelations of friends on 
both sides of the Atlantic, what close companionship 
with so noble and sweet a nature must have been, 
and what it must be to go mourning it all one's 
days. Blessed those unions where Death stretches 
but cannot break the links. 

I can at least tell you what Lady Gilbert looks 
like. She is a slender, stately, and still unusually 
beautiful woman of the brunette type, with a per- 
sonality which singularly fits the idealizing character 
of her work. 

With her fateful sort of beauty, the wistful mouth, 
227 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

the large, dark, deep-set, tragical eyes, she might be 
pictured as the very embodiment of the romance and 
mysticism of her native land. 

She has woven the spell of literary enchantment 
about us marvellously in her romances, " The Wild 
Birds of Killeevy " and "The Wicked Woods of 
Tobereevil," to name but two of her most popular 
stories ; and how thankful we are, in these days of 
minute, sordid and unimportant realism in fiction, to 
the novelist who can take us into the realm where at 
once the beautiful and desirable become the intrin- 
sically probable and our dearest dreams come true. 

Our author's discoverer, in her own girlhood, and 
his later years, was Dickens. With all her personal 
beauty and magnetism, and her rare social grace, she 
was in these days the shyest of women ; and evaded 
as far as possible, all personal meetings with literary 
celebrities. Indeed, her desire for retirement has 
never left her. She travelled on the continent of 
Europe, loved Italy, but loved still better the green- 
sward and changeful skies and sea-beaten coasts of 
her native land. 

For the years before her marriage she lived with 
her mother and a younger sister, Clara Mulholland, 
who is also favorably known in literature. An older 
sister is the wife of Sir Charles Kussell, the Lord 
Chief Justice of England. 

Among other memorable visits in Ireland, was my 
afternoon in the kindly companionship of Father Rus- 
228 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

sell, at " The Cottage," at Raheny, near Dublin, the 
abode of Jane Barlow, author of " Irish Idyls," and 
other Irish sketches and stories, which have attracted 
the admiration of many a reader who cannot boast a 
drop of Irish blood. 

Indeed, it was such a one, a publisher of fine 
literary instinct, who seven years ago, bestowed on 
me the first book of Jane Barlow's I ever saw, 
calling my especial attention to its merits. It was 
the Irish Idyls ; and presently, I was breaking my 
heart over the pathos, and healing it with the comedy 
of life in Lisconnel. 

It was a day in mid-November when we visited 
Jane Barlow, and though it had been warm and 
sunshiny, the slight evening chill made the open fire 
in the drawing-room very welcome, and the " afternoon 
tea" equally so. One side of the apartment was 
completely filled with a fine organ — the delight of 
Miss Barlow's brother, who is a Protestant clergyman. 
There was the usual dark, substantial furniture of 
an Old World drawing room, some good pictures, 
including an oil-painting of Miss Barlow's mother, 
whom her famous daughter strikingly resembles ; 
such souvenirs of travel and suggestive bric-a-brac as 
accumulate in the homes of cultivated and studious 
people. 

Miss Barlow's attractive sister received the expected 
guests most cordially. Presently Miss Barlow came 
in ; a slight, fair-complexioned woman dressed in 
229 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

black, with abundant auburn hair, worn very simply, 
thin, refined features, and large blue eyes, in which 
her whole life and soul seem concentrated. 

She is a fragile-looking woman, with a low soft 
voice, which one does not hear often enough. She 
is an admirable listener, but very reserved of speech. 

Her vitality has gone so abundantly into her 
books that you feel she should conserve carefully the 
small amount she has left for her material wants. 

Miss Barlow is not a Catholic, but she has so deep 
a sympathy with the Irish poor, that she naturally 
sympathizes with the faith which makes their heroic 
endurance of hard conditions possible. Don't you 
remember that sweet story, " Mrs. Martin's Com- 
pany ? 

One is surprised to know that Miss Barlow's 
total residence on the Western coast of Ireland, 
whose scenery and people she describes so faithfully, 
covered less than three weeks. 

She has sojourned for some time in Constantinople 
and the country round about, and has several 
sketches in result. It is not strange that these are 
as vivid and sympathetic as the Irish sketches, for it 
is not hard, after all, to translate the Orientals to 
the Irish. They have no end of points of resem- 
blance. 

Miss Barlow, like Lady Gilbert, is also a poet, 
though we believe her poems are yet uncollected. If 
she had never written any but that heart-breaking 
230 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

bit, "A Misunderstanding," suggested by the famine 
in Connemara in the spring of 1898, it would have 
given her a sure place among the poets of the 
human heart. 

Dublin has been always the centre of a charming 
social and intellectual life ; and this, without reference 
to the presence of the Lord-Lieutenant and his little 
court at Dublin Castle. The official circle, of course, 
makes a large part of the gayety of the season, and 
the brilliancy of the social pageant. But the Irish of 
intensest Nationalism have perhaps more than a pro- 
portionate share of the cultivation, the intellectual 
ability, the social grace and beauty of the city. If 
one wants an accurate picture of Dublin life in all 
its aspects, he will find it in that really notable book 
of last year, " A Triumph of Failure." 

It was my good fortune to meet people who might 
have been the originals of the most charming charac- 
ters in its pages, both among the clergy and the laity 
— though, unhappily for myself, I had not the privi- 
lege of meeting its brilliant author, the Rev. P. A. 
Sheehan, of Doneraile, whose name, since the publi- 
cation of "My New Curate," has become so well 
known in America. 

A prominent man in the political and literary life 
of Dublin is Count Plunkett, patriotic Irishman and 
devoted Catholic ; an authority on many phases of his 
country's chequered history, especially on the Irish 
part in the Jacobite Wars. 

231 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Count Plunkett sojourned long and studiously in 
Italy, and is now a recognized exponent of the 
painting, sculpture and architecture of that land of 
beauty. 

He visited the United States on his wedding 
journey, more than ten years ago, and he and his 
charming wife made many friends, as their sojourn 
was long, and their travels naturally more extended 
than those of the ordinary English-speaking tourist 
from the other side, who is beginning to " do " 
America as too many of us " do " Europe, in from 
six weeks to two months of the summer. 

Count Plunkett is singularly blessed in his home- 
life, with the rosy little dwellers in its populous nur- 
sery ; and the sweet, clever and altogether womanly 
Agnes Deane of " The Triumph of Failure " above 
mentioned, has a duplicate in the ruling spirit of this 
happy little realm. 

Among the literary people, natives of Dublin, 
whom I met in London, I recall with especial pleas- 
ure an old-time literary friend, Katharine Tynan 
Hinkson, established in that city since her marriage. 
Mrs. Hinkson's poetry is very well known on this 
side of the Atlantic. John Boyle O'Reilly and his 
associates, and the late Alfred Williams of the 
Providence Journal were, I think, the first in 
America to greet the true poetry and the great 
promise revealed in "Louise de la Valliere " and 
" Shamrocks." 

232 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Literary London early welcomed Katharine Tynan 
to its choicest circles, for William and Christina 
Rosetti had been greatly impressed by her poetry, 
and had had her for their guest. 

The two books named above have had many 
successors, both in poetry, novels, and collections of 
short stories and character sketches. 

Mr. Hinkson also devotes himself to literature, 
and the two so congenially mated have a pretty little 
home at Blenheim Crescent. 

Another young Irish literary worker of much 
personal distinction and originality is Charlotte 
O'Conor Eccles. Of notable Irish patriotic an- 
cestry, and knowing her native Dublin in its every 
nook and corner, in all its historic and religious 
associations, she is now one of the busiest of Lon- 
don's workers in literature and journalism. 

Long sojourns in France, Germany, and Austria 
during the earlier years of her still short life, have 
broadened and deepened her character and experi- 
ence; and her knowledge of languages, and her 
habits of observation and study make it impossible 
that she should not profit of every new outlook 
which the vicissitudes of life afford her. 

I met Miss Eccles first in Boston, when she was 
making a few months' visit in this country two years 
ago. In Boston she enjoyed exceedingly the literary 
people among whom her lines were cast ; and they, 
in turn, were charmed with the cosmopolitan-minded 
233 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Irish girl, with her bright, handsome, expressive 
face, distinguished presence, and delightful wit. 

Our next meeting was in the green and white 
study, giving on a pretty little garden full of late 
September flowers in the Eccles' home in Mar- 
gravine Gardens, then not long bereaved of the gentle 
invalid mother. 

Miss Eccles is perhaps better known in purely 
literary circles by her pen-name, Hal Godfrey, under 
which she has published one of the cleverest and 
most successful novels of last year, "The Rejuvena- 
tion of Miss Semaphore," — a piece of delicious 
drollery. 

A more recent book, bearing Miss Eccles' own 
name, and published in America, is a fine translation 
of one of Henry Sienciewicz' most fascinating though 
sombre stories, " Peasants in Exile," first appearing 
in the Ave Maria, Notre Dame, Ind., of whose 
editor, the Rev. Daniel E. Hudson, she had those 
appreciative things to say that an American Catholic 
realizing the great work he is doing for literature 
and religion, loves to hear. 

Miss Eccles has a gift for brilliant, incisive, and 
memorable epigram. Her studies of Irish character 
are charming ; always sympathetic, and with a large- 
ness to be looked for in one of almost cosmopolitan 
experience. 

Miss Eccles' younger sister Mary is also a news- 
paper and magazine writer. They are near kindred 
234 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

of Mother Mary Austin Carroll, the gifted author 
of the successive "Leaves from the Annals of the 
Sisters of Mercy," and a score of other books, 
historical, biographical, juvenile. 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 



XXIV. 

Religious Well Springs in Ireland. 

When one considers the small territory of Ireland, 
the poverty of her people, her constantly disturbed 
political condition, the drain of immigration, even 
from a time long antedating the great exodus of '48 
and '49 ; and further, the most important fact that 
it is only seventy years since Catholic Emancipation, 
one's wonder grows beyond measure at the multitude 
of missionary colleges, and of most diffusive religious 
institutes which have had their beginnings in Ireland. 

Politically, their warmest friends cannot, alas ! 
cite the Irish as models of unity ; though now, with 
the Town Councils in operation, and the United 
Irish League promising a richer growth than even 
the Land League and the National League enjoyed 
in former years, much lost ground on the road to 
Home Rule seems to be in the way of retrieval ; and 
the people likely to compel unity among the leaders. 

But in religious matters it is quite different. Is 
there aught to surpass the unity of the Irish in the 
Catholic Faith ? How they have held to it in their 
poverty and multiplied martyrdoms, when rich and 
powerful nations fell away — untouched by schism 
or heresy, spiritual-minded, of cosmopolitan breadth 
of view, sacrificial, persevering, unconquerable ! 
236 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

How wonderfully they adapt themselves to the 
renunciations of the priesthood, and the stern dis- 
cipline of the religious state ! How fruitful they are 
in vocations ; having always enough for home needs 
and something to spare for their beloved America, 
for England, Australia, Central Africa, and all the 
isles of all the seas ! 

Even while the penal laws were in force, religious 
institutes for the instruction of the sons and daughters 
of the poor, sprang up amid the ruins of the Visible 
Church in Ireland, like her own irrepressible ever- 
greens, and after '29, what a revival of missionary 
colleges, institutes of charity and education ! 

My stay in Ireland was too short to permit the 
extensive visiting of religious foundations, which 
would have been so proud a privilege and pleasure. 
I saw something of the College at St. Stephen's 
Green, Dublin, where Cardinal Newman had been 
president of the attempted Catholic University in 
Ireland. At least, we owe to that experiment his 
great book, a mine of wisdom even for the instruc- 
tors of youth in a humbler way, " The Idea of a 
University." I visited the beautiful, artistic and 
most devout little chapel, in which Newman habitually 
celebrated Mass. The College is in the hands of 
the Jesuits, but not the chapel, though the latter is 
still open to visitors, and Masses are celebrated at a 
fairly early hour both on week days and Sundays. 

I visited the Convent of Mercy, on Baggott Street, 
237 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Dublin, cradle of the famous Sisterhood, which has 
spread in little more than fifty years into every land 
wherein the English language is spoken. Here that 
devout Catholic and exquisite lady, Catharine McAu- 
ley, and her companions founded a religious order 
without planning or premeditating so grave a step, 
but simply under the irresistible propidsion of the 
Spirit of God. 

The convent is dark and solid-looking without, its 
front flat to the street ; but simple and cheery within. 
The garden is in the rear, and here is the grave of 
Mother McAuley, with the simplest inscription on a 
plain marble slab. But it never lacks a few flowers 
from the convent's house-plants and the loving hands 
of the dear mother's spiritual daughters. 

To come here seemed like revisiting a place already 
familiar, for had I not eagerly read the graphic life 
of Mother McAuley by Mother Mary Austin Carroll, 
and her " Leaves from the Annals " ? 

There are great schools and other representations 
of the work of the Institute at Baggott Street, but 
time failed me to see them in detail. 

The novitiate has been transferred to Carysfort, 
the old mansion of the nobleman of that title, but it 
has been remodelled somewhat for conventual needs. 
Here they treasure many a souvenir of Mother 
McAidey. I saw the fine silver-mounted inkstand 
of her earlier life, duly inscribed. There is a beauti- 
ful chapel, approached by a long corridor, filled with 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

devout pictures and inscriptions. Withal, Carysfort 
seemed to me very like an American convent. 

I had a somewhat similar feeling for the splendid 
motherhouse of the Loretto Nuns at Rathmines. 

This flourishing institute for the higher education 
of girls is of Irish origin, the foundation of Mother 
Mary Teresa Ball, whose noble portrait bust stands 
in the front hall. 

I noticed here, among other representations of the 
work of the eminent Irish sculptor, Hogan, a replica 
of his Dead Christ, the original of which I had seen 
under the High Altar of St. Teresa's Church, Dublin. 

The convent is very beautiful, the appointments 
for the pupils being exceedingly comfortable and in 
the fine taste of spaciousness and simplicity. There 
were a few American girls here, and they kept their 
flags in evidence ! 

Most of the girls belong to wealthy and some to 
titled families. 

Said Father Russell, as we entered a room full of 
little curly-heads of six to eight years : " How many 
children in this room have the name of the great St. 
Bridget?" 

Three little beauties rose up proudly to claim it. 

It was a simple, but very suggestive incident. 

The religious of the Sacred Heart have a large day 

school in the city, and a boarding-school, which we 

visited, in the suburbs of Dublin. I saw the pupils 

at play in the spacious grounds, in their neat black 

239 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

uniforms, and they looked exactly like the pupils of 
the same order at the Trinita in Home, or at Man- 
hattanville, New York. 

A tower of strength in its splendid unity and 
effective organization is this order, to the cause of 
religion and scholarship ; a flower of modern France, 
but nourishing everywhere else, as if indigenous ; at 
home in ancient Greece, as in Western America or 
New Zealand. 

A day or two before leaving Ireland, I spent a 
few hours at Maynooth, and saw something of its his- 
toric edifices under the guidance of the Rev. John F. 
Hogan, editor of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, and 
nephew of the Very Rev. John B. Hogan, S. S., D.D., 
president of our own St. John's Seminary, Boston. 

It was a warm November day, with sunshine of a 
pale rose-tint, and the late autumn flowers on every 
side. A short railway ride, brought me to the 
station ; but thence to the college, was my second 
ride on an Irish jaunting car. Irish poets have 
celebrated this national conveyance till its fame has 
crossed all of the seven seas. I don't like it, but I 
am a good climber, and an excellent holder-on. 

First, I saw the noble old ruin, " the castle " 
mantled with ivy, near the entrance of the grounds. 
Then through the great gates, to feast my eyes on 
the vast front of the college, and the stately Gothic 
church to the extreme right. 
240 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

There was something so awe-inspiring- in the 
height and breadth of the pile of masonry before me 
that only the remembrance of a friend at court, so 
to speak, saved me from a too depressing realization 
of personal inconsequence. 

Dr. Hogan, whose pen has made him so well 
known to many who have never seen him — he is a 
Dante scholar and has just published a new " Life 
and Works" of that great poet — is a tall, dark, 
youthful-looking man, with regular features and 
kindly aspect, the worthy representative of a most 
virile priesthood, rather reticent, yet with no trace 
of distrustful reserve ; full of that intensity of 
conviction, purpose, feeling, held in check, which 
mark all men who accomplish work worth doing 
and notably influence their fellow men. 

He showed me the beautiful church ; the vestments 
and other gifts of the late Empress Elizabeth of 
Austria, who loved Ireland and its great ecclesiastical 
training school ; the libraries, the Aula Maxima, 
built by the munificence of an American alumnus, 
the Right Rev. Mgr. James McMahon, founder of 
the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University 
of America ; the reception rooms and dining halls. 

Everywhere were portraits ; those of the thurch- 
men and statesmen connected with the foundation of 
Maynooth, in 1795, among the latter, of the great 
Protestant statesman, Edmund Burke, whose elo- 
quence prepared the way for it ; of another Protest- 
241 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

ant, William Robert, second Duke of Leinster, who 
gave the site for it ; also of William, fourth Earl 
Fitzwilliam, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 
in 1795 ; and of John, second Earl Camden, who 
succeeded him in the same year, both friends of 
Maynooth ; and as all these things befell, during 
Ireland's brief experience of self-government — 1782- 
1800 — a portrait of still another of Maynooth's 
Protestant friends, Henry Grattan. 

Then there is a portrait of Dr. Hussey, the first 
president, a friend of Dr. Johnson, and of whom 
Boswell wrote that " he was eminent not only for 
his powerful eloquence, but for his various abilities 
and acquirements." 

There are more portraits of presidents, portraits 
of the Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, authors, 
scientists, who revere Maynooth as their Alma Mater. 
Those of later years came back to her centenary 
from Australia, South Africa, America, as well as 
from every part of Ireland and England to render 
her their filial homage. Grand faces, most of those 
displayed in corridor and reception room, some typi- 
cally Irish, some, though of Irishmen, showing traces 
of almost every nationality under heaven, as one is 
wont to find in every assemblage of men of Irish blood. 

We saw students taking their exercise in the 
grounds, men representing many different lands, but 
all slender, active, alert-looking — quite like the 
students of any of the American seminaries. 

242 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

In a typical professors parlor some rare and beau- 
tiful pictures, and the glow of the open fire offset 
the bookcases that ran up so high, and bore so for- 
midable an array of gravely clad scholarship. 

Maynooth is a missionary college, but there were 
no lack of reminders that Ireland was a missionary 
nation before Maynooth was dreamed of. 

Though Maynooth was the slight concession of a 
Protestant government to a Catholic land, and had 
some government aid until 1870, this was never 
accounted as more than a small instalment of jus- 
tice, and the priests of its training were patriots 
always, anxious to help their poor country by every 
legitimate means to those rights, to which, as Leo 
XIII. says, it cannot be supposed that Ireland is 
not as well entitled as any other land. 

Perhaps the great Archbishop McHale, of Tuam, 
one of Maynooth's most illustrious sons, the devoted 
friend and helper of Daniel O'Connell, best embodies 
the patriotic spirit of Maynooth. 

It is not necessary to dwell on Maynooth as a 
citadel of rigid orthodoxy ; nor to enumerate the 
theological, philosophical, liturgical, scientific, and 
biographical works, the translations, etc., of Dr. 
Murray — the Protestant Whateley's great antago- 
nist — Dr. Crolly, Dr. McHale, Dr. O'Kane, Mgr. 
Russell, the Abbe Dare ; Professor Callan, Professor 
Molloy, Dr. McCarthy, Archbishop Walsh, Arch- 
bishop Carr, and others. 

248 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

Every year, in the annual meeting of the Arch- 
bishops, after the summer ordinations, and for the 
conferring of degrees, the greatness of the spirit 
of Maynooth, and its advance on the path of true 
progress is strikingly manifested. 

There is something, however, which one can feel 
better than one can express, after even a few brief 
hours within these stately walls. 

It is the keen consciousness that here is concreted 
the peculiar religious spirit that marks the Irish race 
at its best. The dominant characteristics of this spirit, 
it seems to me, are faith and reverence. What is there 
like the Irish faith anyhow ? And that which keeps it 
strong and bright is its reverence — its holy fear. 

One says, sometimes, in contemplating certain 
aspects of the many-sided Irish character, that Ire- 
land would be more at home in the Mediterranean 
than in the Northern seas. 

Yet her thought of God and her expression of it 
is not Southern. 

Nothing more false to life can be imagined than 
the religious expressions which certain writers of 
fiction put on Irish lips. Whoever heard an Irish- 
man say " Howly St. Patrick ? " Who ever heard 
from anyone of Irish blood " Wid the help of the 
Saints ! " etc ? 

There is a tremendous reverent reserve — an effort, 
so to speak, to show the creature's distance from the 
Creator, in the prayerful ejaculations of the Irish. 
244 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

They do not make themselves at home in God's 
House, like the Italians ; they do not talk familiarly 
of the " good God " with the French, nor of the 
" dear God " with the Germans. 

They say, Hebraically, " The Lord God," " Al- 
mighty God." 

They say, in moments of fear, " Lord have mercy 
on us!" "God save us!" "The Cross of Christ 
be about us ! " They address Our Lady as " Holy 
Mother of God," or, u Blessed Mother," or " Blessed 
Virgin." 

In their rare moments of religious expansiveness, 
they will say, especially of the little sick or dying 
child — " God love him ! " 

For with all the communicativeness of the Irish, 
there is a sacred reserve among them on matters 
of personal religious experience; as there is, too, 
strangely enough, in affairs of the heart. 

Yet, where is the confidence in God to surpass 
that of the poorest of the Irish in presence of trans- 
cendent sorrow, or of death itself ? Who says more 
sweetly and sincerely — "God's will be done!" or 
" Welcome be the will of God " ? 

Something of all this one feels at Maynooth, the 
silent wt power house," so to speak, of that electrical, 
religious energy which is felt from the Irish race to 
the ends of the earth. 

Not alone in Maynooth, or in other holy places, is 
that singular quietude felt. But elsewhere it has 

245 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

not the same good cause to exist, and the American 
of Irish blood, restless and impatient of all delay, 
chafes at it in ordinary life. 

" But don't you know," said a clever woman not 
of Irish blood, to me, when we spoke of that, and of 
the Irish in the fastest marches beyond seas — " it 
is always quiet in the power-house/' 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

XXV. 

Contrasted Voyages. 

On the little steam tug which took out from 
Queenstown the few passengers bound for Boston 
to the Dominion of the Dominion Line, on that 
hazy, late November morning, there was a little 
family group which drew my eyes — a middle-aged 
father, a young-faced mother, two stalwart boys 
verging on manhood, and a little girl. They were 
nice-appearing, well-bred people, and were all looking 
forward eagerly as we approached the big boat ; and 
looking forward, too, I saw among a little group of 
nuns on deck, one leaning over the railing and wav- 
ing welcoming hands to the family party on the tug. 

I learned, after we got on board, that the lovely 
young nun was the oldest daughter of the little 
family, who had left her happy Irish home a few 
years before to enter the Novitiate of the Society of 
Notre Dame des Missions, at its mother-house in 
Paris. After her novitiate she had been assigned to 
an English house of the Society, and was now one of 
a party of four religious, volunteers for a mission in 
far-off Manitoba. Her family had come for perhaps 
their last chance in this world to see the face of 
their dear one, but they were brave, and they met 
with cheerful eyes. The cabin passengers withdrew, 
with fit delicacy, and left the little group to their 
own last looks and words. As we were moving out, 

247 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

the little nun, pale but smiling, was still standing at 
the deck-rail, looking shoreward, but now at the 
fast-retreating boat, and soon at the mist which hid 
the very outline of her native land from sight. Shall 
she ever see it again, with those who make it home, 
until she looks down on it, like the Blessed Damozel, 
from the ramparts of God's Heaven ? 

But this daughter of a sacrificial people did not 
long look back. As the only English-speaking mem- 
ber of the little community, she had much to do for 
her French Sisters. 

Whose sacrifice was greatest — her mother's or 
her own ? A priest told me of an aged widow, living 
alone but for the kindly neighbors, in a little village 
cabin in Ireland. Her sons had died or emigrated. 
She had had a daughter — among the oldest of her little 
flock. Where was she ? asked the sympathetic visitor. 

kt Oh, Father, I gave her to God long ago. She's 
now in a convent in Texas, God be praised." 

" And you alone ! " 

"Father, when she was leaving her Irish convent 
long ago — I had the boys then — we exchanged 
crucifixes with each other; there's mine that was 
hers beyond. We meet in prayer every day, and it 
won't be long till we meet in Heaven, glory be to 
God ! Would I grudge her to Him at the start, or 
want to take her back ! " 

So it is that up in Manitoba, or down in Texas, or 
in mid-Australia, or Southern Africa, or Peru, or 
248 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

Chili or Argentina, you meet the Irish priest or nun. 
And, all the time, 

' ' The heart of the Irish mother 
Is as true as God, 
And as sorrowful as Christ." 

The Sisters of Notie Dame des Missions were 
travelling under the protection of the Rt. Rev. Bishop 
Legal, Coadjutor of the Diocese of St. Albert, and 
two Oblate Fathers, and it was in this diocese, not so 
very far from the Arctic Circle, that these refined and 
delicate women were to have their field of labor, 
teaching the children of white settlers or the little 
aborigines, as need might be. 

The library was at the disposal of the missionaries 
and the few Catholics on board, in the earliest morn- 
ing watches ; and there every day, long before the 
dawn had brightened over the waste of waters, three 
Masses were duly celebrated by the good Bishop and 
the Oblate Fathers, his companions. Never had the 
offering of the Holy Sacrifice seemed so awe-inspiring 
as in this little room, with its tiny improvised 
altar, and the murmur of the sea for accompaniment 
to the voice of the priest. 

One table held all the cabin passengers on this 
trip, and the missionaries sat together at the lower 
end. We all came to know them well before the 
voyage ended ; for, though reserved, they were kindly ^ 
and even the shy French nuns smiled sweetly at the 
249 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IN 

recurrent evidences of the respectful interest which 
they inspired. 

The captain who went without a wink of sleep for 
an incredible time, because of the dense fog which 
kept him on the bridge, was very kind to the little 
religious family on board, and his consideration was 
deeply appreciated. 

" For their sakes the sea is smooth," I said to him 
one day, as we had a few turns on the deck together, 
and he praised the brave spirit that carried them into 
the Northern wilds for God's sake ; for this stalwart 
Welshman was serious and reverent-minded. 

For their sakes, also, I verily believe, we got in a 
full day ahead of the time for which we were sched- 
uled, thus escaping one of the most destructive storms 
of many years. 

What a contrast this quiet return voyage to the 
bright outgoing, while summer heats lingered, and 
the skies, though clouded, were warm ! 

Then we filled the saloon of the New England, at 
meal-times, and the decks were populous with 
promenaders. 

She was taking over many English and a few Irish 
people of means, who had been spending the summer 
in the United States and Canada. A few bright 
American girls were outward bound for study in 
their several specialties in England and Germany. 
Several Boston physicians and journalists, worn out 
with hard work in an unusually hot summer, were 

250 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

going over, just for the sake of the sea-voyage ; and 
the genial Commissioner of Boston's penal and 
reformatory institutions, for a brief study of foreign 
institutions of the same sort. 

There were striking individualities not a few ; 
young people and flirtations galore ; children who 
raced and climbed from dawn to dark, and had 
appetites as insatiable as the sea; singers and 
dramatic readers enough for us to organize a 
splendid entertainment, at which the friend of 
Rudyard Kipling from South Africa applauded 
to the echo that poem of Boyle O'Reilly's, beginning : 

" The world was made when a man was born ; " 

and at which the Lord Chief Baron Pallas, of 
Dublin, was our splendid presiding officer. 

But there were no concerts on the return trip ; 
no material for flirtations ; no little golden-haired 
mascot following her dear Captain like a pet kitten. 
Above all, and saddest for the writer, there was no 
"Club of Seven," with its moving Boston spirit 
serious of face, when he could control those sparkling 
Irish eyes. How often I thought of his immediate 
fraternization with everyone, including the stiffest 
and most literal Britishers on board ! Was it on the 
first night out that he played pool with Sir A. C — , 
and made the sturdy Liverpool merchant take him off 
on a lark as if he were a long lost brother ? Certainly 
it was not much later than the second day, that he 

251 



NEW FOOTSTEPS IX 

was presenting all the passengers to the dignified 
Lord Chief Baron. 

Many a time as I paeed the much shorter deck of 
the Dominion — a miniature New England — I felt 
as if I must meet him " looking for some one to play 
with," as we used to say in the mornings of the voyage 
out. 

We had an Anglo-Scotch commercial traveller 
on our homeward voyage, who boasted that, al- 
though he lived very near Charlotte Bronte's old 
home at Haworth, he had never visited it; still 
worse, had never improved his frequent opportunities 
to see Melrose Abbey. 

By force of contrast, I thought of that splendid 
American Scotchman on our out-going trip, with his 
face set towards " hame and mither," with his keen 
appreciation of all literature, and his patriotic pride 
in the literature of the land of Robert Burns. He 
read for us about the Old Doctor of Drumtochty, in 
" The Bonnie Brier Bush," at our entertainment ; 
and my last sight of him was with his head reverently 
bared, as some steerage passengers were taken off at 
Queenstown, saying softly, " God bless them every 
one." 

It had been warm and cloudy going out ; it was 
cold and cloudy coining back. I walked for hours 
against the breeze, longing to go back and winter in 
Rome. 

But at the first sight of the three-hilled city of my 
252 



WELL-TRODDEN WAYS. 

home, the seven hills of the Eternal City receded into 
cloudland; my long idle fingers twitched for the 
familiar feeling of a pen, and my unprecedented 
vacation was as the memory of a tale that is told, or 
of a vivid dream upon the edge of waking. 



THE END. 



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